 |
| MBS couldn't stop himself from cracking up during his March visit as Trump bragged on the "deal" he'd made with the cheesy visual aids his staff prepares for him. "Look! Airplanes!" Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP. Don't believe Saudi Arabia is America's generous pal. And his claim that MBS is giving the United States $110 billion worth of business is bullshit, as you probably know by now. As Yglesias writes today, Saudis are far more dependent on the US than the other way around; this special relationship has been out of date for many years. |
A couple of years ago, during the presidential campaign, America was all exercised about the fact that the Saudi Arabian government seemed to have made donations, some of them possibly while Hillary Clinton was serving as secretary of state, totaling over $10 million, conceivably as much as $25 million, to the charitable organization run by Clinton's husband and daughter, where the money would be used for things like buying AIDS drugs for patients in impoverished countries, microcredit for poor business owners, and programs to empower women and girls, which never seemed to get a mention in the news stories, along with the fact that Norway had put in approximately the same amount, and other countries donating smaller but still big sums included not just the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Qatar and Morocco and Algeria but also Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, UK, and Germany.
They did sometimes mention that Clinton's opponent, Donald Trump, was also vaguely rumored to have some funky business relationships with some other countries, as in this
20 August 2016 story by Amy Chozick (remember her?) and Steve Eder:
