The Grim Spectacle of Trump’s Gaudy Saudi Summit

Oligarchy, AI, Saudi money, and social media content makers—the dominant forces in the US economy—came together in gaudy fashion this week. Saudi leaders and financiers took center stage at a lavish White House party and a star-studded US-Saudi business summit that ended with President Donald Trump designating Saudi Arabia as a “major non-NATO ally,” worthy to be given F-35 warplanes and other perks. The multiday event was a shameless series of garish spectacles, paid-for celebrity cameos, and murder apologia—all in order to further elevate America’s favorite dictator, Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman (aka MBS).

For 80 years, the US-Saudi alliance has survived on the basis of a bipartisan disregard for democracy and human rights. It is the most transactional of relationships—affording a brutal monarchy protection from both its own citizens and regional rivals in exchange for oil. So it’s no surprise that Trump, the most transactional of presidents, would embrace a murderous autocrat as a close ally. He did the same in his first administration—and that was before the Saudi government gave Jared Kushner $2 billion to invest on its behalf, among many other favors dispensed to Trump’s family and inner circle of supporters. What seems different this time around—as with many other abuses of power and corrupt self-dealing during Trump’s second term— is the fulsome nature of the MAGA-Saudi bond, driven home in the Trump administration’s willingness to basically celebrate murder and graft.

On Tuesday, during an appearance with MBS in the newly decorated, gilt-covered Oval Office, Trump was asked about the former Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in October 2018 in a Saudi consulate in Turkey by a Saudi government hit squad, widely believed to have been directed by MBS. As MBS stared placidly at the ground, Trump immediately sprang to his defense. “He’s done a phenomenal job,” Trump said about the monarch seated beside him. “You’re mentioning someone that was extremely controversial. A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen. But he knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest.”

“Things happen” is a characteristically amoral Trump excuse for barbarism, and it also sounds like, as the venture capitalist Paul Graham pointed out, Mafia-speak. Sometimes your hired thugs off the wrong guy. You move on. After all, there’s money to be made—trillions, if you believe the fantastical promises being tossed around DC this week.

That night, at an opulent White House dinner, Trump presented an evening of entertainment for MBS and numerous prominent tech and finance figures, including Elon Musk, former Cantor Fitzgerald CEO and current Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, venture capitalist turned AI and crypto czar David Sacks, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI President Greg Brockman, and Skydance mogul David Ellison. This latter suitor of the Saudis’ favor reportedly hopes to tap sovereign wealth funds from the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia to acquire Warner Brothers for his growing MAGA-aligned media empire. The soccer great Cristian Ronaldo, whose eye-watering compensation package from a Saudi football club includes a $200 million annual salary, was there, posting a group selfie that captured the rancid glitz of it all.

Here’s how The Wall Street Journal described the scene: “The president’s favorite tenor, Christopher Macchio, serenaded business executives. A band played ‘Ave Maria’ and the Beatles’ ‘Let it Be,’ according to an attendee and another person familiar with the matter. Guests dined on honeynut squash soup, pistachio-crusted lamb and a pear chocolate mousse—served on gold-rimmed plates.”

It was as if the leading characters inflating the AI bubble had gathered in one place to pay tribute to the main generative forces in this speculative mania. The two most consequential players in attendance were Nvidia, whose highly coveted chips have made it the world’s most valuable company and its CEO, Jensen Huang, into a quasi-statesman; and the Saudi government, whose endless stream of investment capital has kept the bubble aloft. Plenty of other supporting players were there with hands outstretched, and the event was followed by the Trump administration approving the export of tens of thousands of Nvidia chips to Saudi and Emirati state-run companies.

The AI bubble has become characterized by an interlocking series of circular, highly leveraged financial relationships that might lead one to wonder whether there is truly enough money to sustain all this data-center buildout and industry hype. If we’re judging by current AI company revenues, there is far from enough. But as long as the Saudi government and other Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds are willing to keep subsidizing this fools’-gold rush, the bubble should continue to grow.

After the White House gala came a US-Saudi economic summit, in which representatives of the two countries’ political and economic elites took turns hymning each other’s greatness and promising to keep bankrolling investment mega-projects. The most corrupt president in US history is lording over a teetering, debt-laden economy barely held together by the unjustifiable capital expenditures of resource-devouring AI data centers. Meanwhile, MBS, working under the guise of economic modernization and political reform, has cracked down even harder on a population already lacking basic civil rights, while wasting hundreds of billions on nonviable building projects.

In about a decade in power, MBS has directed incredible amounts of money toward the United States, helping to underwrite the AI building boom while acquiring choice assets—and influence— in tech, sports, media, military manufacturing, and other key sectors. He’s now promising $1 trillion in US investment; six months ago, when Trump visited Riyadh, the number was $600 billion. These pledges recall Meta princeling Mark Zuckerberg caught on a hot mic during a White House dinner asking Trump what number he wanted to hear; the sums being thrown around are practically fictional, made up to suit circumstances.

The authoritarian rulers of both the United States and Saudi Arabia were clearly relishing a media-friendly spectacle distracting their home constituencies from the parlous conditions they’re facing. But when that spectacle is a parade of tuxedoed members of the ruling class now steering the American economy toward collapse, it’s a sobering study in the return of the repressed. The president’s open defense of a journalist’s dismemberment should be the lasting sound bite from this dismal and embarrassing week of theatrics. Committed MAGA followers can justify anything—including, apparently, Trump’s close friendship with a pedophile and sex trafficker—but we can still hope that most Americans don’t endorse our chief psychopath’s chilling mantra that “things happen.”