Donald of Arabia
U.S. presidents have long courted Saudi Arabia, the desert monarchy whose exports include fundamentalist Islam, 9/11 hijackers, and oceans and oceans of oil. For even longer — from Thomas Jefferson through George W. Bush — they have explicitly included Islam among the faiths that America proudly tolerates.
Having infamously broken with the venerable tradition of American religious tolerance with respect to Muslims, President Trump has strangely amplified the less admirable custom of indulging a regime that promotes an extreme form of the faith. Not only did Trump give the Saudis the honor of his first overseas visit as president, but he also largely dispensed with past administrations’ criticism of the kingdom’s mistreatment of women and others. “We are not here to lecture,” Trump said Sunday in Riyadh. “We are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be or how to worship.”
Trump’s trip is bound to reveal the limits of his divisive approach in other places. In Israel on Tuesday, he is to visit the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, where officials felt compelled to reiterate the nature of the genocide after Trump omitted Jews from a statement about it. At the Vatican, Trump will meet the first Latin American pope, an eloquent advocate for refugees and a critic of his obsession with fortifying the Mexican border.
But it will be hard to outdo the dissonance of Trump’s tributes to the homeland of the vast religion he has constantly disparaged. During his campaign, Trump pushed a discredited story about New Jersey Muslims celebrating the World Trade Center attack, told CNN that “Islam hates us,” and threatened to close Muslims’ houses of worship, force them to register, and block them from immigrating. Only the courts have prevented him from following through on the latter.
Meanwhile, in Riyadh, Trump called Islam “one of the world’s great faiths,” confined his criticism of extremism to Saudi enemies such as Iran, and noted that most victims of Islamist violence are Muslim. National security adviser H.R. McMaster described Trump’s shift to ABC as “learning.” One hopes the president will learn such magnanimity toward wretched refugees as well as fossilfuel royalty.