When President Donald Trump stood with Mohammed bin Salman in 2018 after the Saudi government murdered journalist and political dissident Jamal Khashoggi, the Senate unanimously approved a bipartisan resolution condemning the Saudi crown prince.
This week — seven years later — Trump had nothing but kind words for Prince Mohammed during his visit to Saudi Arabia, and most Republican senators didn’t blink.
“President Biden worked with him at the end,” Sen. James Lankford, who said in 2018 he had no reason to doubt the crown prince was responsible for Khashoggi’s murder, said this week when asked about Trump’s praise for Prince Mohammed. “Every president’s going to work with the leadership of Saudi Arabia. That’s been a long-term ally of ours and will continue to be a long-term ally of ours.”
Trump says he’s more than a strategic ally.
“I like him a lot,” he said this week. “I like him too much.”
“Mohammed, do you sleep at night?” Trump asked at an event in Saudi Arabia. “Critics doubted that it was possible, what you’ve done, but over the past eight years, Saudi Arabia has proved the critics totally wrong.”
“Riyadh is becoming not just a seat of government but a major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world,” he said.
American intelligence reports found that Prince Mohammed approved the murder of Khashoggi — a Virginia resident and Saudi national who had criticized the Saudi government in his writing. Khashoggi entered the Saudi embassy in Istanbul in October 2018, and he never left.
The grisly killing, evidenced by audio recordings from within the embassy and later acknowledged by the Saudi government, shocked the world. American lawmakers received classified briefings about it at the time, and members from both parties broadly called for the United States to recalibrate its relationship with Saudi Arabia to hold Saudi leaders accountable.
“It’s something we have to address from a human rights standpoint,” Sen. Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state who traveled with Trump to Saudi Arabia this week, said that year. “Just because a country we’re working with did it doesn’t mean the U.S. can just shrug its shoulders and say nothing happened here.”
GOP senators largely shrugged their shoulders this week, though.
“It’s the art of the deal,” Sen. Mike Rounds said of Trump’s relationship with Prince Mohammed. “He wants to work with him. They are a key ally in the area, and the president is doing his best to work a personal relationship.”
But does Rounds wish there was a little more acknowledgement of what happened in the past?
“I won’t try to tell the president how to do foreign relations work with another foreign leader,” he told NOTUS.
And Sen. Cynthia Lummis answered if she had any concerns about the relationship very simply: “I don’t.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina once said there would be “hell to pay” if the Saudi government had killed Khashoggi and called Prince Mohammed “beyond toxic.” Graham has come around on Prince Mohammed more recently, meeting with him in 2023 and praising the country’s purchase of South Carolina-made Boeing 787s. Asked this week about Trump’s praise for Prince Mohammed, Graham’s spokesperson didn’t respond.
Democrats have criticized Trump’s comments supportive of the Saudi crown prince.
“He’s a thug,” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia told NOTUS of Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader. “He orchestrated the murder of a Washington Post journalist who was a Virginia resident, whose family are not just Virginia residents, but Virginia citizens.”
“There’s never been any accountability for it. I cannot excuse that behavior, and I’m never going to forget it,” Kaine said. “The fact that President Trump sees it as a matter of indifference — it doesn’t tell you anything about MBS that you didn’t know, but it says something very unfortunate about President Trump.”
Kaine acknowledged that maintaining relationships with world leaders is a geopolitical reality for American presidents — both the Trump and Biden administrations imposed sanctions on some Saudi individuals connected with Khashoggi’s murder, but neither targeted Prince Mohammed. “But you don’t need to suck up to them,” Kaine said.
Khashoggi’s killing wasn’t a one-off. The State Department’s 2023 report on Saudi Arabia’s human rights conditions found Saudi leaders had been involved in arbitrary killings, enforced disappearances, torture, life-threatening prison conditions, arbitrary arrests, imprisoning political dissidents, targeting Saudi nationals abroad with transnational repression and restricting freedom of speech, among other human rights abuses.
American leaders see the country as a strategic partner in the tumultuous Middle East, however, and Trump has repeatedly hailed Saudi Arabian leaders for investing in American business ventures.
Sen. Chris Murphy pointed to the Trump family’s business entanglements in the region.
“Mohammed bin Salman pays him money,” the Connecticut Democrat said. “Trump’s going to be your PR consultant if you pay him cash, and that’s what MBS has been doing for years.”
Some Republicans avoided answering questions about Prince Mohammed.
“I’ve never spoke to the guy, so I wouldn’t know whether to comment on somebody that I don’t know,” Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley told NOTUS of the Saudi crown prince.
Sen. Thom Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, got the closest to acknowledging Saudi Arabia’s human rights abuses.
“We’ve got to recognize them for what they are,” he told NOTUS on Wednesday. “They’re not a perfect democracy. But you’ve got to engage, just like you’ve got to engage totalitarians like Putin.”
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Haley Byrd Wilt is a reporter at NOTUS.