Arab Emirates,” all of whom have “lobbied hard” against the hold.102
The following month, Donald Trump apparently has contact with alleged Kremlin spymaster Alexander Torshin at the annual NRA conference in Nashville. According to Business Insider, “Torshin tweeted in November 2015 that he knew ‘D. Trump (through NRA)’ … [and] later added that he saw Trump in Nashville, Tennessee in April 2015”; just eight weeks after the event in Nashville, Torshin’s protégé, Kremlin operative Maria Butina, will pose as a reporter at FreedomFest in Las Vegas in order to invite Trump to issue a televised public statement on Russian sanctions.103 The Russian woman’s unusual question to Trump—on an issue surely of limited interest to most U.S. voters—gives Trump an opportunity to declare in a televised public forum his categorical opposition to Russian sanctions. Within a month of his declaration, Trump will be contacted for an interview by a Russian digital media outlet run by former Duma member Konstantin Rykov, who has just registered two pro-Trump websites in Russia: Trump2016.ru and DonaldTrump2016.ru.104 Rykov, the founder of Moscow’s first and largest “dark web” brothel, is a friend of Artem Klyushin, who had been a part of Trump’s Moscow entourage during the 2013 Miss Universe pageant—an event during which kompromat of Trump with Russian prostitutes was allegedly acquired by the Agalarov family.105
At an Alabama campaign rally on August 21, 2015, a few weeks after FreedomFest, Trump says of the Saudis, “I get along great with all of them. They buy apartments from me, they spend $40 million, $50 million, am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much.”106 Nevertheless, Trump complains that the Saudi government “makes $1 billion a day [from oil revenues] … [but] we get nothing” in compensation for the military protection the U.S. military offers the kingdom.107 Trump’s statements will cause the Washington Post to write that “everything in foreign policy is personal with [Trump] … and he likes the Saudis. And why does he like them so much? Because they pay him.”108 Calling “appalling” Trump’s statement about liking wealthy Saudis—including Saudi royals—because they’re customers of his, the Post notes that Trump’s confession of venality is difficult to process even when heard several times: “Here you have a candidate for president of the United States saying that he is favorably disposed toward a foreign country because they have given him millions of dollars, and all but promising to shape American foreign policy in their favor for that very reason.”109
Only a few weeks after Trump implies that his foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia is influenced in part by his receipt of significant revenues from Saudi royals and other wealthy Saudis, MBS breaches international protocol to publicly embarrass President Obama during a press conference. At a September 2015 meeting in D.C. between President Obama, King Salman, and MBS, the young prince “delivers a soliloquy about the failures of American foreign policy” while sitting before the American president—an action considered a transgression under the conventions of international diplomacy because it is done in public.110 According to the Middle East Eye, within a matter of weeks of seeking to embarrass President Obama in this way, MBS is on a yacht in the Red Sea plotting with other Middle East leaders on how to strike a bargain with the man they hope will be Obama’s Republican successor.111
At around the same time that MBS, MBZ, and el-Sisi are meeting on the Red Sea—and during the same period that Trump’s primary national security advisor, Michael Flynn, is working directly with the Saudis on what he calls a Middle East Marshall Plan to counter ISIS and Iran (see chapters 4 and 5)—Trump makes a startling statement at a campaign stop.112 On November 12, 2015, at a community college theater in Fort Dodge, Iowa, Trump tells the assembled crowd, “I know more about ISIS than the [active-duty U.S.] generals do. Believe me.”113 Trump also tells the crowd that he has a plan for defeating ISIS—but that it’s a secret.114 No one in the crowd could know that Trump’s top national security adviser at the time indeed had such a plan, let alone that it had been developed with direct input from the Saudis. Trump’s seeming willingness to listen to input from foreign agents over U.S. intelligence will be confirmed in February 2019, when it is revealed that in mid-2017 Trump told his intelligence briefers that on the question of whether North Korea’s chairman, Kim Jong-Un, had just tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile that could reach the United