Facebook post, not my words
The $400 million jet from Qatar and the late night Taylor Swift posts are designed to distract you from what happened on the first overseas trip of Trump's second term.
I am not referring to the highly choreographed, censored, Hollywood version of his Middle East tour. I am not talking about the tepid and inaccurate reporting from failed legacy media outlets, who only repeated his claim of 'hundreds of billions in deals'.
I'm talking about what really happened between the Trump family, the US oligarchs, and the Sunni dynasties which control the Gulf states.
Let's provide some proper grounding. Before departing on Air Force One, the White House informed the most reliable global news agencies, often referred to as 'the wire', that they would not be joining the administration. This marks the first time in history that journalists from the wire services (like Reuters, Associated Press, UPI, etc) would not accompany the US president on an overseas trip, especially one of this magnitude.
Upon landing, Trump and his family, top aides, and the CEOs of at least 20 major companies scurried to make deals as fast as they could.
Trump's large adult sons wrangled a few billion out of Qatar and Saudi Arabia for golf course resorts. They also landed major crypto deals where cartel members, terrorists, and other illicit offshore wealth will be funneled into their own crypto coins. There's nearly one crypto coin for each member of the Trump family.
The biggest single item of the deal was Saudi Arabia's pledge to purchase 500,000 semiconductor chips from Nvdia, for purposes that remain unclear. Saudi Arabia has zero computer talent as their ruling families are accustomed to not working for anything or providing any value whatsoever. Saudi Arabia is apparently going to buy 500,000 AI chips, at a cost of $50,000 per chip, to put them in the desert where server rooms need to to remain a temperature of 65 degrees, all without any local talent to do anything of value.
China's President Xi must be laughing in DeepSeek.
No one groveled more than Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos. Bezos bowed before Mohammad bin Salman, a man who kidnapped, sexually tortured, and dismembered one of Bezos' journalists, Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi, employed at the Washington Post. The few remaining talented reporters still employed by Washington Post must rest easy at night knowing in the event someone murders them because they dislike their reporting, the boss will kiss their killer's hand. Not exactly a fantastic workplace vibe for a newspaper, but I digress.
To be honest, there isn't enough space in this post, or any post, to describe the torrent of deals that happened. We are talking about the 60 most powerful companies on earth, mingling with 20 or so members of the Saudi and Qatari ruling families, all pitching deals to channel oil money into their pockets.
One attendee, the CEO of Blackstone, the company responsible for buying up swaths of single-family homes and rental buildings across the US, using algorithms to squeeze every penny out of American renters, pitched a monster deal where Saudi Arabia would recycle billions in petrodollars into the financial products comprised of bundled rental payments from millions of broke Americans. The same Americans who a study released this week showed 60% of whom cannot afford the basic necessities of life.
Elon Musk landed a significant deal with Saudi Arabia to use his Starlink system for aviation and nautical systems. The military industrial complex, the tech CEOs, and the crypto creeps emerged from the summit with ear to ear smiles. It was a spectacle for the ages as the ruling elites of Saudi Arabia sought to greenwash, tech wash, and generally launder their oil wealth into the coffers of America's tech titans.
To be clear, Saudi Arabia is a backward nation of women-hating oil thieves and slavers who have nothing but contempt for our democracy and values. They have financed terrorist atrocities across the world, including 9/11. The Saudi sultans and sheiks attempt to spin their countries as reformed and modern by investing in goofy golf tournaments, but every single strip, brick, and building of the 'new Middle East' was built on the backs of chattel slaves from South Eastern Asia.
These Sunni sultans and sheiks, like the Trump family and the Silicon Valley tech bros, are the takers of the world. They contribute nothing. They live solely to extract as much wealth and amass as much power as they can.
And the takers of the world, like the Sunni elite and the wannabe dictators like Trump, share a similar model: that vision rests on holding the workers and makers of society in total contempt. The people who build our cities, teach our kids, manage our National Parks, research cancer cures, staff our hospital and hotels, farm our food, and generally provide the entire structure and foundation of modern life are deserving of nothing more than squalor, poverty, terror, cruelty, and denied even the basic recognition of citizenship. This is the model of Dubai. This is the vision of Trump's America.
Trump and his dopey sons aren't the captains of this ill-fated journey. Not by any stretch...
Peep🧐 Trump's little hands holding onto King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud's hand. At first glance, it appears Trump is gently supporting an old and enfeebled man. Which is weird, because he doesn't even hold his own wife's hand. But upon closer examination, it's the King who has stuck his middle finger right through Trump's palm as he grips his wrists with the other fingers. He is guiding him around like a donkey.
Trump is being groomed.
The Saudis played the President of the United States like Pinocchio at Pleasure Island. They rolled out their silly lavender carpet. They bussed in a McDonald's trailer so bozo could enjoy a Big Mac in the sweltering 110 degree heat while he canoodled with the people who funded 9/11. They adorned him a Toys R' Us gold chain. They even pawned off a rusted jet they were unsuccessfully trying to offload for years.
The only thing the Saudis wanted was the ability to launder their money into America's leading semiconductor technologies and boatloads of our latest weapon systems.
In the end, hundreds of billions of dollars changed hands. The number of hands numbered no more than two dozen. The 77 million MAGA muppets who voted for this traitor were not part of any deal.
Link. They also have links to articles. I would archive everything and put a bullet point, but too many people complain for anything I do.
Yeah, if they pulled the raid on Osirisk 2.0.
Honestly, that's good, and very different than what we normally would do. I'll take a distant favorability with geo-political realism over "Netanyahu can do no wrong"
I don't actually think he's as ideological as Ronald Reagan. He might even be more of a Realist than Henry Kissinger. It's a kind of "no stupidity" Realism, where he's basically testing out the waters and putting his toes everywhere, to see how deep it is and if he wants to swim... even if no one's ever done it before. If he doesn't like what he's getting, he immediately shifts. He's not willing to go down the wrong road for years.
I heard Dan from LotusEaters describe something similar with his Tarif negotiations. When he lessened the tariffs, it's because he was "cashing out his winnings". Basically, he starts a plan, and if it works, he'll only keep it going as long as it works, and cash out when it stops working.
Whatever he did with Israel was working, until it stopped. Then he backed off and signaled he'd try something else. As a result nobody was prepared for someone like Trump to be so RealPolitik as to pull out of a negotiations with Israel at the first (or even 3rd) sign of trouble. And it looks like the Arabs are taking advantage of that right now. Given his behavior, it incentivizes people to come to him with a good deal up front.
It's clearly a negotiation strategy, like walking into a Car Dealership with an 810 Credit Score and $75,000 in cash, and asking for "something comfortable, maybe a Corolla". If they offer you just their most expensive car, you know they're not listening to you, and you walk. You got out early and saved your time, the more people you do that to, the more the other dealerships will understand to offer you what you want upfront and not try to negotiate you down.