The Saudi Favor That Endangers America

I’ve been in those rooms. I’ve watched career intelligence professionals present hard, uncomfortable truths in real time, only to have them dismissed because they got in the way of someone’s “relationship” with a foreign leader. This week’s Oval Office moment with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) wasn’t just déjà vu. It was a warning.

When Trump shrugged off U.S. intelligence about MBS’s awareness of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder, “things happen,” he didn’t just minimize the assassination of a U.S. resident and Washington Post journalist. He told every autocrat watching:

If you’re good to him, financially, politically, or personally, your worst behavior will be forgiven.

This is not neutrality. This is impunity.

And it comes at a cost. It damages our credibility, it endangers Americans overseas, and it signals to the world that values like press freedom and human rights are negotiable depending on Trump’s personal alliances. That’s not foreign policy. That’s a loyalty test.

The Oval Office Rewrite, and What Got Erased

In the Oval Office, Trump and MBS weren’t just smiling for the cameras, they were rewriting history in real time. Trump dismissed U.S. intelligence on Jamal Khashoggi’s murder as if it were a minor misunderstanding, while MBS projected the image of a “reformer,” despite a track record defined by repression and regional destabilization.

And there’s a reason 9/11 families watched that moment with outrage. The 9/11 Commission documented multiple Saudi-linked individuals who assisted the hijackers inside the United States. For two decades, there’s been a fierce dispute over Saudi responsibility, only intensified by the 2021 declassified FBI files and additional ones released in 2023 in response to a lawsuit, detailing contacts between hijackers and Saudi officials on U.S. soil. And through it all, 9/11 families have begged presidents of both parties to stop giving MBS and the Kingdom special treatment. Their fight for transparency didn’t disappear just because Trump chose to look away.

What got erased in that room? A long list of inconvenient truths:

• the brutal murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. resident

• years of Saudi human-rights abuses

• Riyadh’s deepening security partnership with China

• the stalled normalization plan with Israel

• the unresolved questions and pain of 9/11 families

• and the broader pattern of U.S. presidents shielding the Kingdom from accountability

That Oval Office moment wasn’t diplomacy. It was a public whitewash, and a deliberate one.

The Part People Pretend Not to See

For years, we’ve allowed the conversation around Trump and Saudi Arabia to be framed as “geostrategic,” “complicated,” or “just diplomacy.”

Let’s stop pretending.

It’s about money, and it always has been.

The Saudi–Trump financial web isn’t some fringe theory. It’s well documented:

• Saudi investments in Trump properties and projects.

• Massive post-presidency business windfalls.

• Senior Trump allies and family members—hello, Jared—landing billion-dollar deals with Riyadh despite a lack of experience.

Foreign governments don’t make those investments out of charity. They do it because access is expensive, and influence is priceless.

When those financial entanglements shape presidential decisions, you don’t have national policy, you have leverage. You have compromised judgment. You have a foreign leader buying his way into the White House’s blind spot.

Ask yourself: Would Trump casually wave away intelligence about a brutal killing if this were a country without deep personal and financial ties to him and his family?

We all know the answer.

The F-35 Deal: A Geopolitical Earthquake Hiding in Plain Sight

Trump’s announcement that the U.S. would sell F-35 stealth fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, the crown jewel of American airpower, despite warnings from national-security officials in his own administration, should set off alarms everywhere.

These aren’t ordinary weapons. The F-35 is a fifth-generation aircraft that is nearly invisible to radar, deeply integrated with U.S. intelligence systems, and capable of shifting regional power balances overnight. No Arab nation has ever possessed them.

For decades, the U.S. has followed one rule: Israel maintains the qualitative military edge. That’s not a slogan. It’s federal law. And every administration, Republican or Democrat, treated that edge as sacred because it stabilizes the region. You may disagree with the policy, but that’s the reality.

Trump just tossed that rule out the window.

He decoupled the F-35 sale from regional normalization entirely. No strings attached. No Israeli sign-off. No guarantees about Saudi limits on military cooperation with China. No assurance that advanced American technology won’t end up compromised.

He didn’t do this because it was strategically sound. He did it because the Saudis were willing to buy, and Trump has always framed U.S. weapons sales as “tremendous business,” bragging that Saudi arms deals mean “hundreds of billions… jobs, jobs, jobs,” and refusing to halt them because it would “stop massive amounts of money” flowing into the U.S.

But this isn’t an aircraft sale. It’s a geopolitical reshaping of the Middle East on behalf of one of Trump’s closest foreign benefactors.

Here’s what the move actually does:

• Weakens Israel’s long-standing security advantage

• Elevates Saudi Arabia as the most militarily advanced Arab power

• Short-circuits U.S. oversight and long-standing bipartisan guardrails

• Creates massive new leverage for Riyadh over U.S. policy

• Hands MBS the most advanced stealth fighter in the world at the same moment Trump publicly excuses him for a murder

This is how national-security vulnerabilities are created, not in classified memos, but in public deals wrapped in flattery, money, and personal loyalty.

The Pattern Is the Point

None of this is new. It’s the same playbook Trump has used for years: reward the loyal, punish the truthful, and bend American power to serve personal interests.

Look at the pattern:

• Pardons for corrupt loyalists

• Smears and threats against truth-tellers

• Attacks on U.S. intelligence when facts get in his way

• Favors for foreign strongmen who flatter him or fund him

• Punishment for allies who won’t play along

This isn’t chaos. This isn’t improvisation. This is a governing philosophy.

Authoritarians understand that dynamic immediately. They read it as permission, permission to act brutally, to silence critics, to ignore the rules, because Trump has shown he will look the other way if you stay in his good graces.

And that’s why what happened this week isn’t just troubling, it’s perilous.

Why Americans Should Care

You don’t have to follow foreign policy to understand this:

If a president is willing to ignore his own intelligence community in favor of a foreign leader who benefits him financially, none of us are safe.

That’s not strength. That’s not “America First.” That’s the erosion of national security from the inside out.

This moment wasn’t about MBS alone.

It was about the message Trump just broadcast to every bad actor on the world stage:

And the rest of us will live with the consequences.

More soon,
Olivia