Josh Marshall has a great post up today about the “personalization” of foreign policy and how the whole mideast pageant we’ve been witnessing is about all the richie rich’s get their taste. I’m excerpting a big chunk but you should read the whole thing:
Now in fairness, trade delegations have always played a role in these visits. But this is at a totally, totally different level. In fact, if you step back, you see that this entire visit isn’t mostly about U.S. foreign policy at all. Trump is bringing “his” CEOs and everyone is cutting deals. And as the top dog, Trump is cutting his too — and to be clear, not as President of the United States, but as Trump. Eric Trump has already been in Qatar inking a whole slew of new deals with the country’s royal family.
This is the right way to understand the 747 pimpmobile “gift.” It’s basically a sweetener to get a whole series of business and consummated relationships over the finish line, and yes a few of them are tied to the U.S. government. In a real sense, the sales of military hardware are the payback for the personal business deals. Calling it a “bribe” almost doesn’t do it justice. It’s more like the decked-out Maserati one Fortune 50 CEO gives to another after they ink a $100 billion merger — a kind of token of appreciation for a vastly larger transaction, which in the case of Trump involves subverting U.S. foreign policy to the interests not only of Trump’s pocketbook but cementing his power within the U.S. If Trump can use his power as President to cut in all the big CEOs on the money geyser in Saudi Arabia, you can bet they are going to stay securely on his side in the U.S.
If we step a bit further back still we see this is where the meaning and the symbolism of the murderers row of tech oligarchs at the inauguration really comes into fruition. This is government, at home and abroad, of, for and by the oligarchs. If Elissa Slotkin doesn’t want me to say “oligarchs,” fine. We’ll focus on Trump wanting to be king. That’s another reason why he likes those folks — even the ones who bankroll Hamas. They’re kings. They get it. They’re Trump’s kinda guys.
He also points out something I haven’t seen anyone else make note of:
There’s a side light to this lurid drama worth noting. Trump’s campaign against foreign students in the U.S. has been at least nominally focused on support for Hamas among the protests against the Israeli onslaught on Gaza. Butler and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has several times recently said that “Hamas supporters” are not welcome in the U.S. and will be expelled. And yet the Qataris are quite literally the top bankrollers of Hamas and they speak for them and help them negotiate with the Great Powers and with Israel. It reminds me of a story about Karl Lueger, the populist Mayor of Vienna at the turn of the 20th century who was one of the key articulators of and arguably one of the creators of mass-politics political antisemitism. And yet Lueger would himself dine with and socialize with members of the capital’s Jewish elite. There’s a famous story in which someone asks Lueger: “You’re the big enemy of the Jews and yet you socialize with them and some are your friends. How can you justify that?” To which, Lueger is said to have responded, “I decide who’s a Jew.”
Like Lueger, like Trump. He’ll decide who’s a Hamas supporter.
He apparently decided that the Emir of Qatar isn’t one which is absurd in the extreme. He loves him. After all, he wants to give him a flying palace.
The dissonance must be part of the plan, I think. They’re trying to drive us crazy.