The Press Box - Dissecting the Actions of Mohammad bin Salman | Damage Control (Ep. 543)

Episode Date: October 25, 2018

The Ringer’s Justin Charity and Kate Knibbs get together to talk about the spate of potential explosive devices sent to prominent Democratic figures this week (2:14) and how the right-wing media immediately tried to spin it (12:55). Then, they cover the killing of Jamal Khashoggi and how it might affect the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia (21:17). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey guys, this is Sean Fennessey. I'm the editor-in-chief of The Ringer and host of the Big Picture podcast. Oscar season is ramping up, and so is the Big Picture. That's why we're moving out of Channel 33 and into our own feed. We're going to keep bringing you more banter about this year's Oscar contenders and more deep conversations with the filmmakers behind them. So to hear more from your favorite directors and the movie-obsessed staff of the Ringer, subscribe to The Big Picture on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nibbs. Welcome to Damage Control. on the Channel 33 Network, a podcast where we unpack what upsets, excites, and divides us in popular culture. So let's get started. This is a tough week in a lot of respects. The Saudis murdered a Washington Post columnist. Weeks ago, the Turks are raising hell in response, but so far the Trump administration seems to be standing quietly by the Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman.

We're going to talk about his strange, sorted role in this. this emerging diplomatic crisis. But first, there's a developing news story that we're going to talk about. There might be new information coming out after we record this podcast. What we do know right now is that someone tried to kill billionaire liberal donor George Soros with a pipe bomb. And then pipe bombs and explosives were sent to the Clintons, former President Obama, CNN headquarters in New York, and a variety of other liberal. figures. As of right now, we don't know who's responsible or what their motivations are,

but many of the people who were sent bombs are primary targets of right-wing extremist anger. And we're going to talk about how these assassination attempts fit into the current domestic terrorism situation. Okay, so just to recap what we know right now, yesterday a pipe bomb was discovered at George Soros' home. Today, news broke that someone or a group of people have tried to kill many, many prominent political figures. So explosives were sent to former President Obama, the home of Bill and Hillary Clinton, the headquarters of CNN, the headquarters of Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Recently, there have been reports that bomb may have been sent to Kamala Harris' office. That's what we know right now. There might be more. But basically the point is that there,

there's obviously a rash of attempted assassinations. No one has been harmed, but these attempted murders of extremely powerful influential people are extremely disturbing. It's also kind of leaving us at a loss because right now we don't know who did this. The facts just aren't available. We don't know if they have a coherent political ideology. We don't know if they're aligned with any foreign or domestic terrorist groups. It's just too soon to know these things. But it's really, really tempting to assume it was right-wing extremists

because the Clinton, Obama, Shoros, and CNN are all regularly subject of conspiracy theories about a global cabal trying to destroy America. The New York Times reported today that these attempted bottomings have sparked an investigation into whether a bomber is going after targets that have often been the subject of right-wing ire. There's a lot of unknowns right now. we can't save for certain who did this. But it is important to note that the far right-wing media has already started its own narrative, and that is that these bombs are false flag operations.

Alex Jones and Rush Limbaugh have both claimed already that Democrats are behind the bombs in an effort to sway the midterms their way. even though there's no actual information about what's going on, there's already this misinformation campaign happening, which is sort of very 2018. Right, right. It's like people treating it like this weird fake strategy game where it's, again, people are, I mean,

people are literally drafting talking points about a series of assassination attempts. They're trying to turn them into cable news style talking points of like, actually the Democrats did the, and it's given how this story has been developing in the past 12 hours, how rapidly it's been developing and how exponentially morbid it is, it is uncanny to watch that happen. It's uncanny to watch the political discourse have to engage with it in these electioneering terms. I feel really overwhelmed because like when we were initially just going to talk about the Soros pipe bomb and, you know, he is a really interesting figure, so he is a bit less well known than the rest of the people who've been sent bombs. If you're not familiar with him, he's an extremely rich man. He's a Hungarian man who made his money in hedge funds and has sort of become a really, really prominent donor to progressive political causes in the U.S. and internationally. and because of that, he's sort of become a really big focal point for conspiracy theories

that sort of paint him as a puppet master of a sort of like global elite attempts to like reshape the world. And he's been sort of, he's been portrayed like that for a while. And I think that his inclusion in these bombings sort of is the most compelling evidence that there's some sort of right week. motivation, right? Yeah. Originally yesterday, right?

So Tuesday of this week. Soros was the only attempt that we knew about. He was the first one. And so the fact that, especially in the past month, Soros has been the subject. I mean, this is true of Soros always, like in the past decade and some change. But specifically in the past month on the eve of the midterm elections, Soros has been the subject of right-wing scrutiny. including, you know, scrutiny from Trump himself, about, you know, is Soros the one bankrolling bidder work in Texas?

Is, you know, Soros fund, you know, Soros is funding the socialist Antifa. You know, I'm almost lapsing into Alex Jones voice as I say all of this, because basically George Soros is who Alex Jones is talking about when Alex Jones rants about the globalist. Yes. You know what I mean? And he has been sort of. the boogeyman for a lot of, like, Donald Trump himself recently blamed Shoros for anti-Kavanaugh protests.

Right. Like, Trump has directly fed this conspiracy theory. And he's not the only one. Like, Senator Chuck Grassley also said he believed that Soros was, like, behind this quote-unquote paid protester situation. So Trump has sort of explicitly and directly supported this conspiracy theory. Not just supported it as a conspiracy theory, but supported it as a point of rage and mobilization for right-wing figures and right-wing activists and just like conservative people in America. Yeah. So it's incredibly tempting to just.

assume that this is a this is like a right wing nut job right it's weird to me how the fact that now today on Wednesday these democratic politicians and Trump critics including John Brennan who is who that's who the person

was trying to target by sending the pipe bomb or sending explosives to CNN they were trying to target John Brennan specifically and John Brennan is the one who he's the CIAA head who had a falling out with Trump and who Trump who Trump revoked his security clearance about a month or so ago. The fact that those politicians were also the subjects of these attacks actually makes it more

complicated to think about what's going on here, just because you go from Soros being one guy who we know for a fact that's just like uniquely the subject of right-wing hire to just a broad slate of liberal but prominent, powerful people who lots of people could have lots of reasons for trying to target, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like, it's weird to think of how many times the Pentagon and the White House have been the subject of anthrax

and ricin and explosives in envelopes. I mean, ricin was just sent to Trump in the Pentagon. And, like, that's why I think it's really, as much as it's tempting to sort of say, oh, God, this was definitely right-wing. extremists. I don't want to do that because there have just been so many historical examples of just people who don't have an ideology and are just wanting to murder people sending bombs out. Like, there were bomb threats to Jewish centers after the election, and it was a mentally ill

teenager. It wasn't anything organized. So I don't want to, I don't want to like pretend that I know who did this, even though I have a suspicion. Right. Well, let's talk about that, though. Like, why do we, I think there's something about, there is very certainly something about the current political climate that makes it really tempting and feel, it makes it really tempting to deduce that this is right-wing terrorism. Yeah. Like, real talk. And again, we can set all sorts of counter examples for saying, hey, let's slow down a little bit and, like, actually sort through what's happening and see who the news reports on actually having. done this, I just think that the country is so on edge.

And part of that is, okay, we're two weeks out from a midterm election, right? That's a pretty, like, boring conventional reason. But then I think the other half of it really is that, like, I think post-Trump, the American imagination has a very different sense of our own capacity for political violence. You know, it feels like the 1960s in a way that no other decade since the 1960s has felt like the 1960s. Yeah, I was thinking about how it's sort of this call back to the late 60s and 70s where there was a ton of bombings going on all across the states from various radical groups. A lot of left-wing radical groups back then.

But one thing that I think is happening now that's really messed up. is that already, while most people are sort of holding off until we find out what happened, there's already this huge push of the false flag narrative from the right wing media. Right. I mean, I think that's interesting because that is actually a very common and at this point programmatic response that the right wing has to anything. Like the fact that whether you're talking about a school shooting or you're talking about pipe bombs being sent to all of these high-level politicians.

The fact that the definitive reflexing talking point for any violence of a certain stature in America is false flag, false flag, that phenomenon is just strange. And I just don't know where to begin to unpack that. It literally is a sort of impulse that people on the far right have for talking about. like murders, like extraditional killings in America is somewhere in a basement, a secret cabal of Democrats got together and decided to kill children or like Barack Obama or something. Yeah, in this case, themselves. Yeah. Yeah, and it's just disinformation could have incited these attacks and now disinformation is warping what happened.

And there's people out there who are. understanding these events in like such a skewed way. Right. I think that the perverse thing is that they're people, right, their right-wing people, they're Alex Joneses, who their first response to this is how can we jujitsu this, again, these attacks to like help encourage turnout among Republicans on November 6th. Like that's literally a. way that people with, not just random people on the internet, we're not talking about like egg

accounts with 86 followers. We're talking about prominent right wing figures with huge platforms. Like their way of processing this is to think about voter turnout in two weeks among the voting base that isn't even aligned with the people who are just the subject of these attacks. Like that's, there's something about that that's like astounding. unhuman. I know. I went to the Info Wars site today to see what Alex Jones was saying.

And yeah, who is like false flag. Democrats are just trying to fix the midterms. I guess it's good that he doesn't have his social media platforms anymore. But this has been interesting to watch unfold because just this week, there have been a lot of parallels drawn between left-wing protest. where, or not even left wing, just like liberal or anti-GOP, when prominent, like, Republican politicians get heckled at restaurants, there have been some parallels drawn between that behavior

and then much more serious threats of violence. And I just think that this today makes any parallels look really, really foolish. Yeah, you know what? I was recently watching, did you watch the Ted Cruz Beto O'Rourke debate last week? No, I just looked at the summaries afterwards. I can't bear to watch Ted Cruz speak. I can't either, but I was writing about the debate for the website, so I didn't have a choice. Yeah, I write your piece.

There was one line in the debate where Ted Cruz is, you know, he's playing, he's hamming up the whole Kavanaugh, like, look at these liberals, they're out of control, or out of their minds. And there's a line where he starts talking about the left, he says the left wing mobs, beating on the doors of the Supreme Court. court. And I just, I heard that line. I was like, do you realize that there was a right-wing rally in Charlottesville where a right-wing mob murdered a woman and brought daylight on camera? And your point of comparison for that is protesters in D.C. knocking on the door of the Supreme Court. Yeah. Like, there's just a, you know, there is a profound moral relativism in the Republican Party and within American conservatism that you just, you know, there is a profound moral relativism that just makes incidents like this so maddening to engage with.

You made the point right of like if you go back to the 1960s and the 1970s, that's sort of where you'll find the left-wing analog for some of this stuff. But I think if you limit yourself to the present contemporary context, I just, I think that the context for what we think of is right-wing violence versus left-wing violence, they're not really, like you said, they're not really similar. And I think that's the context that makes it difficult to resist certain readings of these explosives being sent around to liberal politicians. Yeah. This is a thing that a lot of people I think are thinking, like, this is what the right wing does now.

I think that the political spectrum has really changed. And the right has gone so far further into extremism that it is hard to. compare the two. They're not, I mean, they don't line up neatly because now there's this whole ecosystem of media trying to spin what's happening in like a way that's completely divorced from reality. Right, right. And maybe like some of the more crazy weathermen had those thoughts back in the day, but they didn't have a really good platform to disseminate them. Like the internet, I think, has accelerated the tilt towards extremism and the ability to get that message out there. Yeah, I definitely think social media has made it easy to be fringe and popular all at once.

Because it's just like even if you're fringe, everyone on your fringe knows where you are. It's like you have a bat signal now in a way that like you might be fringe, but every fringe person who agrees with you in America is following. your Twitter feed. There are no margins. It feels like there are no margins in American political life anymore. It feels like no matter where you fall on the spectrum that you're referring to, you are represented somewhat prominently in the present discourse and in the political climate, especially

if you're an angry political faction. It's hard to process a lot of this stuff. I know. Because we're working, like you said, it's like we're working in a vacuum of information. But it's not like that vacuum of information is going to be filled with, okay, the police are going to tell us this. That's not the only thing it's going to be filled with. That vacuum is also going to be filled with Alex Jones. And so then we're forced to contest with Alex Jones' account of events.

Yeah. And Alex Jones is going to be faster than the FBI in terms of telling us, quote, unquote, what's going on. Yeah. I'm just curious whether the Trump White House will ever take right-wing extremism seriously. Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. It's just really hard to grapple with the feeling that I have that this threat will not be ever taken seriously because a lot of these extremists are propping up the administration. There's a point at which for Trump, if you start alienating the, there's basically no difference between alienating, like, violent right-wing extremists and alienating, like, non-violent, hardcore Republicans. Like, once you start to discourage one, you start to discourage the other necessarily.

And so I think Trump, I think it's like a combination of the fact that he's a troll himself. He's just a troll. And two, he just recognizes that. He recognizes that violent right-wing extremism and non-violent right-wing extremism are, for his purposes, indistinguishable in terms of morale and in terms of how do I encourage people to support my political movement and turn out to vote at elections and keep my party in power. During Charlottesville, that's definitely what I thought. his hedging his hedging about there being

bad people on both sides and good people on both sides I don't think it was him trying to say I'm glad that Heather Heyer was killed I think what he was trying to do was stop short

of making his most diehard supporters feel like they weren't on the same page as him and I think that calculus is why don't think that anybody

outside of his base can turn to Trump in a moment like this and expect any sort of coherent ethical leadership. I don't even think he has the capacity to offer coherent ethical leadership. Right. I'm glad none of the attempts were successful. As far as we know. As far as we know currently.

At 136 p.m. Eastern State of Time on Wednesday. Should we talk about an assassination attempt that was successful now? I mean, we should talk about it, but it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, somehow even more dark than the conversation we've just had. But we'll find a funny story for next time. Yeah, next time, though, I have this time, unfortunately. Kate, it's been 22 days since Jamal Khashoggi disappeared. Saudi Arabia has all but admitted that Saudi agents assassinated the Washington Post columnist,

but they're sort of characterizing it as an interrogation, fistfight situation gone wrong, as opposed to an officially sanctioned assassination. So now it's up to the United States and other nations, other Western nations, and also Turkey, to decide how they want to respond. But let's break down the timeline a little bit just because I think a big part of this story is not just the fact that the Saudis assassinated a journalist, but the way in which the assassination has come to light and played out as a sort of diplomatic fiasco in the past couple weeks.

So Khashoggi goes missing on October 2nd. That's when he's last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Days later, Turkey starts, you know, the Turkish government starts leaking reports through the press that the Saudis killed Khashoggi in the consulate. The earliest report suggests that they not only killed Khashoggi, but they hacked his body up with a bone saw and smuggling them out of the consulate in boxes. It's like the most soprano style execution I've ever heard of.

And the Saudis deny this. Yeah. They deny it very sort of melodramatically. They say not only they deny it, but they say we're going to let the Turkish authority search the consulate. which is their own sovereign soil. They offer to form a joint investigation with the Turkish government. And then Donald Trump, meanwhile, weighs in to say that he has no idea what's going on. I think he floated the idea that there were rogue.

It was a rogue assassination. Right, right. Assassination. And so in the middle of all this, you have the Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, hosting an investors conference in Riyadh. The Davos of the Desert, isn't it called? Right. And the thing about this conference is that you have a lot of Westerners.

You have a lot of American senior officials and a lot of business leaders scheduled to attend. Now, these revelations about Khashoggi being killed and the consulate are coming to light. It's creating this very bad political situation. The Washington Post specifically is running a lot of hardcore coverage of this whole plot. And they're sort of, I would say the Washington Coast becomes the leader of the effort to get. I mean, they're journalists that murder. Yes. Fucking crazy.

And they're the ones sort of leading the effort to say, hey, like the U.S. needs to rethink its relationship with Saudi Arabia. So the senior American officials pull out of the conference in Riyadh. You have, you know, their American media and business partners start to pull out of the conference. but the conference goes forward anyway. It's just there are less Americans there in Riyadh at the moment. And very gradually, Turkey has revealed that its intelligence agencies have audio recording of Khashoggi's death. And keep in mind, the Saudis the whole time had tried to deny that they killed him. They actually insisted that Khashoggi left the consulate alive, that he walked out.

And Turkey this whole time is like listening to Saudi. Arabia revised its story. And every time they do, they immediately have a piece of evidence contradicting what the Saudis just said. And like I said, very gradually becomes apparent that the Turks just have the audio of Keshoyi's death. And they've been stringing the Saudis along and sort of letting them dig a hole for themselves in terms of like embarrassing themselves and making themselves look not credible

in accounting for what happened here. Yeah. Yeah, and that's really wild because basically, I assume it would take a lot for Turkey to admit that it was spying on the Saudis. Right. It makes it clear how important this assassination is. Right. Well, it also makes it clear how bad the Turkish-Saudi relationship is, but we can get into that. There's a lot of context for this. And I think what we want to do here is sort of talk through the very. parties to this diplomatic crisis that have, I just think, such conflicting stakes in the Saudis accounting for the fact that they murdered a Washington Post columnist and are just sort of gaslighting the rest of the world about what happened despite the fact that there is apparently audio evidence of the fact that 18 Saudi agents went to Istanbul to murder this guy.

So first, let's talk about Khashoggi first, right? So he... Complicated guy. Yeah. You were recently telling me that you were reading a book about the Saudi regime and he was a prominent figure, right? Well, yeah, I was reading Robert Lacey's Inside the Kingdom. Like, actually, like, right when this story happened, happened to be reading that book. And, yeah, it's weird.

If you read coverage now of all of this, Khashoggi a lot of times is characterized as a dissident. Yeah, definitely. That's definitely how he's being characterized. And it's not, that's a bit, the characterization I'll say lacks nuance. Like, really, Khashoggi is a guy who has ties to the royal family and has at earlier parts in his career had a very close relationship personally and professionally with the royal family. Like, at times he's been like a spokesman for the Saudi royal family. Another thing that I think hasn't really gotten a lot of attention is just, you know, he's being portrayed as a dissident journalist. He also was like, as you're saying, really close ties with the Saudi family.

He comes from one of the wealthiest families in the world. This isn't some random guy. He is fucking rich. And he, like, he's cousins with Doty Fayette. He's an establishment figure. Like, he was an elite. Right. He's just the non-royal.

Yeah. Yeah, he's an elite dissident. Right. This is like this is another reason why this is such a big deal. Right. It's like the Anderson Cooper of Saudi Arabia. That's a good way of putting it, the Anderson Cooper of Saudi Arabia. I like that a lot, actually.

I haven't read that characterization of it. No, but that's like a very, yeah. And I, it's, we're not saying this to sort of mitigate or questioning Kishuggi's journalism. It's just important to understand that Kishogi was close at one point to the Saudi royal family to maybe better understand why this all ends with Mohammed bin Salman killing him or having him killed or someone in Riyadh having him killed. Because this isn't a case where it's just like, oh, this random Washington Post columnist is Saudi and they don't like that he's publishing bad things about Saudi Arabia or critical

things about the House of Saad in America so they kill this guy. Like, it's deeper than that because his relationship with the Saudi royal family is deeper than that. Yeah. So then, well, we don't really know much about the people who bone sought him except that they clearly watch the Sopranos. Right. Let's talk about MBS. Okay. So the Saudi crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, he's basically, he is the effective.

I mean, there's King Salman. What's his deal? Is he just old? Yeah. Yeah, and MBS, you know, it's like MBS is first in line for the throne. And he is the young, charismatic leader of Saudi Arabia at the moment. And he's remarkable because, I mean, I don't know if you remember this phase about a couple years ago in Western press, like the Atlantic and the New York Times and the New Yorker. Wasn't he, like, on the cover of Time magazine?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, MBS was basically doing this press run of like, hey, I'm the young new leader in Saudi Arabia. I'm not normal Saudi Arabia. I'm cool Saudi Arabia. Right. And I think, so in the way, we were just sort of trying to add nuance to Khashoggi's characterization as a dissident.

I think it's important to add some nuance to MBS's characterization as a reformer. Because a lot of coverage of this will say this is, you know, Muhammad bin Salman's role. in the death of Khashoggi is surprising because he billed himself as a reformer. I don't think that's actually true. I think what Mohammed bin Salman has built himself as this entire time is a modernist. And I think that

that sort of speaks to the fact that his regime in the West, we think of things like him allowing the opening of movie theaters. Yeah, and letting women drive. Right. And that's modernism. But that is apart from what

what I think people would think of if you described him as a reformer. He's not a reformer. He's actually a very autocratic guy. Like, in Saudi Arabia, he sort of associated with a clampdown within the Saudi royal family of, like, who has what power? Gotcha. Right? He sort of created this bottlenecking in which all roads end with Muhammad bin Salman. So in that sense, he's not a reformer.

authoritarian. He just happens to be a hip modernist authoritarian leader. And so I remember when Trump went on his first foreign visit. He went to Saudi Arabia and he sort of, I think this was before MBS was officially named Crown Prince or like right around the time that he was. But Trump and him like really hit it off. He sort of, Trump was like, this is my guy. And they made this big arms deal. and then that's sort of when the whole, oh, look at this new crown prince coming in, like, letting women drive. He's like, what a great ally to the U.S. Maybe we don't have to feel so ashamed of the fact that we've been aligning ourselves with Saudi Arabia for strategic purposes. That's when that whole storyline got pushed out in the media.

But since then, a lot of stuff that he's done has been clearly just not in line with, that narrative. Like he started a war with Yemen that has resulted in like a lot of human rights catastrophes. And that hasn't really gotten much pushback. And then he also like rounded up a bunch of his enemies and tortured them in a hotel. And Trump tweeted like, I support my friend. He knows what he's doing. Like Trump had no problem looking the other way or even endorsing a lot of his actions that were clearly not reform, clearly very authoritarian and disturbing. Why do you think Khashoggi's murder has become this tipping point in U.S.-S.-Saudi relations in a way that nothing else has?

I'm of two minds about it. There's the obvious angle that I think a lot of people, a lot of cynics are echoing right now, which is, oh, no one wanted to pay attention to, to. casualties in Yemen, but they'll pay attention to the death of this one journalist, this one prominent journalist, because that's how the media operates. The media protects its own. I think there's some truth to that, sure. I think Khashoggi is just in a position in society that lent itself to this being a politically

unpalatable situation in Congress, certainly, if not in Trump's head. I think the other part of it, though, is just that I just think that the U.S. Saudi alliance is just so fundamentally bonkers and fraudulent. Like, it's all, it is like the most accidental farcical relationship that the United States has. It's all just sort of the corner that the U.S. painted itself into during the Truman and I. Eisenhower years when we totally alienated Iran and never really have been able to come back from that. And so the entire, the strategic logic of being do or die allies with Saudi Arabia is to counterbalance Iran, which is a country that, I mean, it's a country that at this point is, like, ruled by its own sort of Islamist authoritarian situation that is like a direct product of a. America's own interventions in Iranian politics. But I think all of those things withstanding, Saudi Arabia is our ally because we need to

counterbalance Iran, which is a country that in a different version of American history, would be a way more comfortable ally with the United States than Saudi Arabia will ever be. Yeah. Because Saudi Arabia is just, it is a fundamentalist monarchy that realistically is just, incompatible with like human rights priorities of the United States. Yeah, it definitely seems like it's always been the enemy of my enemy, who also has gas, is my friend's situation. And I'm like, do you think that this is going to be something that will fundamentally alter

the nature of that relationship? No, I think under another president, Obama or under Clinton or under, or under another president, there would be other options here. But I think the fact that one of Trump's core foreign policy principles is just knee-jerk antipathy toward Iran, I think that actually paints the U.S. into this weird corner. Yeah.

Or it just paints the U.S. deeper into that historical corner of, look at the end of the day, you've made this, you've made this mortal, enemy of Iran. And so you're stuck with Saudi Arabia. And if you had a president who was more receptive to and had a more constructive relationship with Iran, you would have more room to feel punitive to war, to take a punitive stance towards Saudi Arabia right now. But we don't have that because Trump's foreign policy doesn't make any fucking sense. But it's also totally consistent with the rest of American foreign policy that doesn't make any fucking sense. I think he just knows

that regionally, like, this is the table he set for himself. This is the table he set for us. And so you couple that with the fact that, like, the State Department is the most dysfunctional department under Trump. Like, it's the department that just doesn't have staff. And it's just like, yeah, I think he just doesn't know what to do. And all he has are his sort of vague, elementary biases against Iran and in favor of Saudi Arabia. The weird thing is that Trump is a fan of Erdogan, the leader of Turkey. And so I don't, maybe

that's like the wildcard here because Erdogan really, I mean, I should clarify like Erdogan was personal friends with Khashoggi, which is that is another thing that sort of tells you how, like about Khashoggi's prominence and that he wasn't just some journalist. Like he was friends with Erdogan and Erdogan himself is not a lover. Not friendly to the press. Yeah. Not. Not. Definitely to the press. But Erdogan has been very bullish about all of this. And on Tuesday, he gave this much hyped speech to his parliament where he just started airing the Saudis out. And again, was like playing his hand of the Saudis keep lying.

Meanwhile, we have the tape. It would be unfortunate if the tape leaked to the press and just embarrassed the Saudis. He's clearly playing his own game here. and on some level he seems to have this exceptionally cooperative relationship with Trump. So I am curious how Turkey might end up privately prevailing on Trump to take a different tact than Trump is currently taking, which is to just sort of like play dumb. I mean, you know. I'm not looking forward to see how this plays out.

Yeah, it's not great. let's just assume we're stuck with Saudi Arabia as a key regional ally in the Middle East. This at least changes Muhammad bin Salman's publicity campaign, right? He doesn't get to be Thomas Friedman's BFF now, right? I think it definitely crumbles the narrative that there's a reason to feel good about being allies with Saudi Arabia. Right. It's weird to me that there is even an urge to have that pretense. People want to feel good about the United States and our foreign policy. This whole incident, if nothing else, like, lays bare the fact that a lot of our alliances are transactional and they're, like, our foreign policy is not guided by principle.

It isn't. Like, if this incident shows anything, it's that. Right. But also, like, imagine feeling good. about U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East in the past 100 years at any point. That's my response to that. I know, I know, but I'm just thinking about, like, the subscribers of foreign policy magazine crowd. Not necessarily us.

Right. We're too cynical to that. I just think that it totally dismantles that narrative that was getting pushed by, like, a lot of mainstream media and by the Trump administration. Right. I think this definitely destroys the MBS reformer narrative. Yeah, it's weird that that narrative even, I mean, it's just if you think about it, right? MBS was basically doing the equivalent of like building a Twitter brand. He was doing the thing.

Remember when Uber was like, oh shit, we've really destroyed our brand and they tried to be like, he was like. A new improved Uber. Yeah. We heard your complaints. And we're. Yeah. Well, as of now, we don't know how the United States. We still don't know.

It's been like weeks at this point. We still don't know what the State Department with the United States is going to say or do in response, like definitively in response to the Saudi, the successful Saudi plot to kill a journalist. We also don't know what's going to happen with these pipe bombs. This is like such a dire note to end an episode of this podcast. This is the assassination episode. It's not happy. It's not happy. Kate promised at the top of the podcast that we'd have a happier episode a couple weeks from now.

But it's the midterms. I feel like it's not going to be happy, to be honest with you. I think it's getting colder outside and colder in this studio. I'll put it like that. It's ice cold in my heart. Yeah. All right, I'm Justin Charity. I'm Kate Nebs.

This has been Damage Control. Thank you for listening. y'all are going to hear from us again in two weeks the week of the midterm elections Kate are you excited for the midterm elections um excited scared nervous I'm a lot of things oh my god well just vote vote channel it vote