Adding Insult to Injury

As Washington braced for the release of the Epstein files, Trump’s red-carpet welcome of Mohammed bin Salman and threats directed at an ABC News reporter made his hostility to journalists chillingly clear.

This week has been a busy one for Donald Trump’s White House. The saga dominating the news has been his about-face decision to encourage the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced society pedophile: “House Republicans should vote to release the Epstein files,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Sunday night, “because we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax.” With that, by Tuesday, Republicans in Congress had voted for the Department of Justice to send the materials out into the world—legislation Trump signed Wednesday night. While that drama was playing out on the Hill, Trump had a social engagement with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of Saudi Arabia—a major story of its own.

This was Mohammed bin Salman’s first visit to the White House since 2018, when Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist, was brutally assassinated at the age of fifty-nine. Khashoggi, who had been the editor of a Saudi newspaper called Al Watan, was known for his extensive reporting on Osama bin Laden; in the eighties, he was the first journalist from a major Arab news outlet to cover Arab volunteers fighting in Afghanistan against the Soviets. In 2017, he went into self-imposed exile and became a contributing opinion writer to the Washington Post. At the time of Khashoggi’s killing, Trump alternately defended the Saudi regime, denied that the assassination had taken place, and dismissed the gravity of a journalist’s murder. (A US intelligence report conducted under the Biden administration found that bin Salman approved the attack.)