Trump Stands With Saudi Arabia After The Murder Of A Washington Post Columnist, Resolving Long-Standing Concern That Killing A Journalist Might Interfere With Arms Sales

WASHINGTON. Declaring that "the world is a very dangerous place," President Donald J. Trump on Tuesday released a written statement reaffirming the United States' partnership with Saudi Arabia, putting to rest any lingering worry that the killing and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist inside a Saudi consulate might complicate the sale of American weapons to the people responsible for it.

The statement, issued seven weeks after journalist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and did not come out, opened with the words "America First!" and proceeded through a long series of exclamation points toward a conclusion the President presented as simple arithmetic. The CIA had assessed with high confidence that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the operation, which Turkish authorities said had been carried out by a team that arrived with a forensic specialist. The President, weighing that assessment against tens of billions of dollars in Saudi arms purchases, allowed only that "it could very well be that the Crown Prince had knowledge of this tragic event. Maybe he did and maybe he didn't!"

In the statement, the President noted that Saudi Arabia had committed to spending vast sums on American military equipment, money he said would support jobs at Raytheon, Boeing, and Lockheed Martin, and warned that any cooling of relations would merely hand those contracts to Russia and China. He cast Iran, rather than the government that had just killed a United States resident, as the genuine source of instability in the region. The unanimous conclusion of the American intelligence community was rendered, in the document, as a matter on which the President happened to feel otherwise.

The posture was consistent with a relationship the President had described warmly for years. "Saudi Arabia, I get along with all of them. They buy apartments from me," he had told a campaign crowd in 2015. "They spend forty million, fifty million. Am I supposed to dislike them? I like them very much." Saudi-linked spending at Trump properties had continued into his presidency, a fact the statement did not mention and was under no obligation to.

Members of both parties objected, several noting that the United States had traditionally reserved the phrase "standing with" for partners who had not recently sent a fifteen-man team to a consulate to kill a journalist who wrote for an American newspaper. The objections did not alter the policy. The arms sales proceeded, the Crown Prince's standing was preserved, and the administration declined to impose any consequence on the man its own analysts held responsible, leaving the message intact for any future government wondering what the murder of a reporter abroad might actually cost.

At press time, the President had reread his own statement, pronounced it strong, and observed that the columnist had not been a United States citizen anyway, as though that were the part anyone had been waiting to hear.