Trump Honors Saudi Family Police State as His Government Ideal

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

23 May 17

Let me now also extend my deep and heartfelt gratitude to each and every one of the distinguished heads of state who made this journey here today. You greatly honor us with your presence, and I send the warmest regards from my country to yours. I know that our time together will bring many blessings to both your people and mine.

– President Trump, May 21, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

ddressing the Sunni Summit, a motley host of countries with little freedom, democracy, justice, or other human rights, President Trump might well have wished he could just begin by saying, “Greetings, my fellow dictators.…” The circumstance was not so auspicious for America’s would-be strongman. Unlike the autocrats of Egypt and Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, President Trump’s authority remains shaky, his control of the emerging American police state insecure, his future somewhat uncertain. No wonder he was “exhausted” just two days into his first foreign trip as president, the same day his former national security advisor decided to plead the Fifth – Gen. Michael Flynn, the same guy Trump apparently tried to protect from an FBI investigation, chose to refuse to testify before the Senate rather than risk incriminating himself in criminal activity. It’s enough for a man to send his daughter out to speak for him, which is what the president did, at an event intended to promote the use of social media for counter-terrorism, a police state activity if there ever was one.

The Trump family must envy the Saudi family business, with its own oil-rich, dissent-free nation, where the preposterously rich royal family is above the law, but the justice system sends unlucky gang rape victims to prison, but not before giving them 200 lashes. Saudi treatment of women makes Trump’s treatment of Melania look almost polite. In an international situation where saying anything honest is out of the question for any but the most courageous speakers, our American president instead symbolically bows obsequiously and begins by thanking “the magnificent Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for hosting today’s summit. I am honored to be received by such gracious hosts. I have always heard about the splendor of your country and the kindness of your citizens, but words do not do justice to the grandeur of this remarkable place and the incredible hospitality you have shown us from the moment we arrived.”

The Trump Traveling Carnival’s big achievement during its two-day performance in Riyadh was a further grand distortion of an already tortured reality in a region where the only country considered free is Tunisia (Freedom House ranks all the Middle East countries as not free, except for “partly free” Israel and Turkey, which gives you some idea of the low standard for freedom at work). Standing out among the non-stop carny acts of the Trump road show was the president’s flat-out commitment of the United States to take sides in the centuries old Islamic civil war. This makes little sense for a “Christian” country, but at least is coming in on the side of the Sunnis, who outnumber the Shi’ites roughly nine to one. The president even got some of the Sunni dictatorships to sign a memorandum of agreement to help fight terrorism, which sounds like it might make sense, but makes no sense at all for all kinds of reasons, including: (1) terrorism has been fueled for decades by the Saudis globally promoting Wahhabism, a radically conservative form of Sunni Islam that considers all other Islamic practitioners heathens; (2) most of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and the Saudis spent untold amounts of money lobbying Washington to keep reports of Saudi involvement secret and to prevent victims from suing the Saudi government; and (3) the Saudis and other Gulf states have played both sides of the terrorist/ISIS wars for years now.

But the US taking the Sunni side in the Islam war makes a kind of perverse sense in that it pits the US against Iran, although there’s no decent reason to single out Iran in a region of blood-drenched bad actors among whom Iran is far from the worst. Saudi Arabia’s human rights record is significantly worse than Iran’s. Iran just elected a new, moderate president with 57% of the vote, a result the minority Trump White House yearns for, even though it seems to have benefitted from more electoral interference than the Iran winner. Another level of senselessness is President Trump’s blindly unexamined condemnation of the multinational agreement that virtually all careful observers agree is keeping Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

Instead of a rational approach to a real problem, President Trump use religious incantation to call for a witch hunt, a jihad, a holy war of Arab-American zeal:

A better future is only possible if your nations drive out the terrorists and extremists. Drive. Them. Out.
DRIVE THEM OUT of your places of worship.
DRIVE THEM OUT of your communities.
DRIVE THEM OUT of your holy land, and
DRIVE THEM OUT OF THIS EARTH. [emphasis in original]

Instead of something resembling reality, the US is now basing its policy on the mad view of Saudi King Salman, “saying the Arab world had no problems with that country [Iran] until its 1979 revolution brought a theocratic government that quickly turned to terrorism and regional ambitions.” Translated: as long as the CIA-supported Shah of Iran ran one of the grimmest police states in the world, the Saudis were happy to exchange torturers with the Iranians. President Trump is dragging the US into bed with thugs and dictators from the Philippines to Russia. And the rationale is that it’s all good for fighting terrorism and promoting trade.

Well, the administration did trumpet that $110 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, claiming in the process that it was even bigger than the $115 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia last September. Perhaps the math was thrown off by the glitter of the Saudi gift of $100 million to an Ivanka Trump pet project for the advancement of women, even though the Saudis suppress their women pretty much as well as anyone, without drawing an audible tut-tut from any Trump. That looks like corruption in plain sight.

The arms deal also looks like continued genocide in less plain sight in Yemen. “Above all, America seeks peace — not war,” President Trump told his Saudi audience. Surely they all knew better. More than two years ago, the US encouraged and supported the Saudi coalition of Gulf states to attack Yemen from the air, to bomb defenseless civilian populations, to use cluster bombs and other anti-personnel weapons, to impose a naval blockade, to create conditions of mass hunger and near-starvation, to turn the country into a virtual prison. This action is an ongoing violation of international law, a war of aggression waged with a nexus of US-sponsored and US-supported war crimes that have been impeachable offenses for the American president every day since March 2015, with no end in sight.

Some in Congress have attempted to block previous weapons sales to the Saudis, and maybe some in Congress will do so again. No one is Congress has yet shown any inclination to confront the reality that we are now on our third consecutive president who is a war criminal.

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William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Roger and Me

By Gabriel Sherman, New York Magazine

22 May 17

 

or the past six years, ever since I began researching a biography of Roger Ailes, there probably hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought or talked about him. I considered Ailes to be the most consequential media and political figure of his generation — a modern-day Citizen Kane. Fox News was practically a fourth branch of government. Ailes helped elect presidents and launch wars, and he remade our politics in his paranoid image, laying the groundwork for Donald Trump’s presidential run. Ailes’s vast footprint on our culture obsessed me. I wanted to understand what drove him to amass so much power.

For all the time I spent thinking of Ailes, I spent very little time with him. Ailes declined my many requests for an interview, and my brief encounters with him were unpleasant. In April 2012, I ran into him during a party at The Four Seasons, shortly after I had returned from a reporting trip to his childhood hometown of Warren, Ohio. “What’s it with you going to Warren?” Ailes snapped. “I left there in 1958. Anything that anyone says there about me is wrong. They don’t know me.” Months later, I was at a reception at the Kennedy Center, where Ailes was receiving an award. When I approached him, his bodyguard shoved me out of the way.

The adversarial encounters revealed a larger truth about my subject: Ailes was a man who was terrified of being known. And they had the effect of motivating me to want to know him more. Over the course of writing my book, I interviewed more than 600 people who had known Ailes from different contexts and at varying stages of his life, from his brother to college friends to politicians to Fox News colleagues. I read letters he wrote that were tucked away in archives across the country, obtained confidential corporate documents, and consulted countless articles and books. My wife told me I was clearly going for a Ph.D. in Roger Ailes.

Denied access, I felt as if I were writing a biography of a dead man — one who was fighting me from the grave. He implored friends and Fox News employees not to speak with me, hired private investigators to track my movements, and set up a “Black Room” surveillance operation inside Fox News to dig up dirt on me. His political operatives prepared a 400-page dossier to serve as a source text for anonymous writers to smear my reputation online, often in anti-Semitic ways. Roger Stone was tasked with keeping tabs on my reporting, and Steve Bannon published hit pieces on Breitbart about me. After one Breitbart article headlined “EXCLUSIVE — Soros-Backed Attack Dog Expands War on Fox,” I received a death threat serious enough that I filed a report with the NYPD. So terrified was Ailes of the prospect of an unauthorized biography that he commissioned an alternative one by Rush Limbaugh’s biographer, Zev Chafets.

Ailes and I developed a strange and intense connection. Indeed, my sources at Fox said he thought about me as much as I thought about him. Meetings were derailed by rants about “Sherman” and “that fucking book.” On weekends, he phoned friends to vent about me. Ailes fired executives he thought were my sources. He told colleagues that I was being paid personally by George Soros to bring him down. It was an absurd conspiracy theory. While on book leave, I was a fellow at the nonpartisan foundation New America, which received a minuscule amount of funding from a Soros charity.

Last summer, the world learned why Ailes was so terrified about having his life made public. The allegations of sexual predation did not surprise me. In my book, I reported incidents early in Ailes’s career in which he had asked female employees to trade sex for professional advancement — all of which he denied, of course. Sources told me the behavior continued at Fox, but no one was willing to go on the record to speak about it. I hoped the publication of my book in January 2014 might spur women to come forward. In the end, it took Gretchen Carlson filing a lawsuit two and a half years later to open the floodgates.

As I spoke about Ailes yesterday in television and radio interviews, I thought of Ailes’s victims, who were denied the closure of seeing their sexual-harassment lawsuits against him go to trial. I thought of Ailes’s teenage son, Zachary, who lost his father and will grow up with that sordid legacy. I thought of the immense damage Ailes did to our political system.

I also felt overwhelmed as I thought about the enormity of what I had taken on. Writing about Ailes had taken a personal and professional toll on me. It was difficult to talk to many people about the downright crazy things I found out about him — and the downright crazy things Ailes was doing to me. When I did, few believed me. At the time I wrote my book, Ailes was embraced by the Establishment. Yes, he was polarizing and controversial, but liberals courted him. (Rachel Maddow, for instance, asked Ailes to blurb her book.) As I did interviews to promote The Loudest Voice in the Room in the winter and spring of 2014, many questioned my portrayal of Ailes as a paranoid and ruthless cult leader. Charlie Rose questioned why I wrote about Ailes’s family, and Norah O’Donnell asked me if I was just a “liberal journalist.”

Even the New York Times participated unwittingly in Ailes’s smear campaign against me: Fox executive Peter Boyer discussed my book with his friend Janet Maslin before she reviewed it, sources told me. In her review, Maslin dismissed the accounts of women I’d convinced to go on the record about Ailes’s sexual harassment. The night her review of my book went online, Ailes’s lawyer, Peter Johnson Jr., wrote an email to Fox colleagues that read, “Wonderful. We knew a person familiar with the theme would hit eventually,” according to a person who read me the email. (Maslin has denied being improperly influenced by Boyer.)

Recently, people have asked me if I feel vindicated that what I wrote about Ailes years ago is now accepted as truth. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t. At the same time, I feel a deep sense of loss. The subject that had been a singular focus of my writing life is now gone.