The Art of The Distraction
Trump and the Arnold Palmer Comment
Trump is nothing if not a master of distraction. He’s got the pundits on cable news hyperventilating over his very hectic weekend. His musings on Arnold-Palmer-in-the-shower, by my watch, got more airtime this morning than any other Trump story, including his cameo appearances at McDonalds and at the Jets-Steeler game, and his doubling down on Fox News of the Nazi-era phrase: “The enemy within.”
It’s a lot to chew on.
So you would be forgiven if you did not notice that, between all this, he slipped in a quick interview with Saudi Arabia’s State TV Al Arabiya, in which he was positively glowing about Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed Bin Salman. Trump calls him, “A great guy.” And also says:
I have so much respect for the king, so much respect for Mohammed, who is doing so great. I mean, he’s really a visionary. He’s done things that nobody else would have even thought about. His very long city that he’s building, he’s really doing something. He’s a great guy. And he’s respected all over the world.
So, you know where I’m going with this…
Mohammed Bin Salman is not only a guy with a questionable human rights record, he’s the main “backer” - how else to put it? - of the lavish lifestyle of Trump’s daughter, Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner.
Trump makes it very, very easy for people to forget this — and the very serious risk Kushner’s business ties pose to American foreign policy and national security - with his continual, successful poking-of-the-bear that is the mainstream media. No journalist seems to be asking him any questions about the national security risk that his daughter and son-in-law could pose to a future Trump administration, because he’s got the media exactly where he wants them: doing deep-dive research into which presidential candidate has now spent more hours working for McDonald’s.
I’d argue that journalists should spend more time studying the Instagram accounts of Ivanka and Jared and think about the deeper meaning beneath the surface imagery, which, as I’ve written here before, could be easily confused with an episode of Real Housewives of Miami.
To the unthinking and sympathetic eye, Ivanka’s social media shows the former First Daughter having a well-earned rest. She wakeboards; she foils; she golfs; she goes boating with the girls; she and Jared entertain in their new $24 million home in the private enclave of Indian Creek.
And, unlike the awkward years of her father’s presidency - remember when Christine Lagarde rolled her eyes when Ivanka tried to insert herself into a conversation with French President Emmanuel Macron, and British PM Theresa May at the G20 summit - the couple is now wanted at the parties of the global elite! Perhaps Christine Lagarde is not issuing them an invitation, but as a consolation prize there’s the Ambani wedding in India, and Kim Kardashian’s 43rd birthday party!
It all seems to be going so well for the couple…
But, try finding a photograph of Ivanka’s dad in the feed….well, that’s not so easy. You have to go all the way back to Father’s Day on June 16th and you have to scroll behind the main image to find it. And when you do….
Given how savvy the couple is about PR — they even hired their own PR advisor when they were in the Trump White House — you know that distance is deliberate.
It’d be unhelpful, to put it mildly, at this late stage of the election season for voters to start connecting the dots between the vast amount of money spent, for instance, on the Kushner’s new Indian Creek “villa”, and Trump’s pronouncements about how GREAT Mohammed Bin Salman is.
As a reminder: Mohammed Bin Salman is Kushner’s main investor. You’ll recall he handed Jared’s new fund, Affinity, $2 billion of Saudi’s sovereign wealth fund to invest, overriding the objections of the fund’s senior advisors who pointed out that Kushner didn’t have any investing experience outside of real estate.
The Chair of the Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden and others immediately opened investigations into the appearance of a quid pro quo which Kushner denied.
But he’s never denied that he and MBS got close.
For MBS, an upside of their relationship, as I’ve reported here, was that in 2017 he got to easily depose the then-Crown Prince, his cousin Mohammed Bin Nayef (MBN), a guy considered an ally and a hero by US intelligence agencies, and sling him into jail. The Saudis and Emiratis blockaded Qatar (where the US has an airbase) and then, when the Qataris didn’t break open their coffers, he rounded up his relatives, put them in the Ritz Carlton, and tortured them until they agreed to give him control of their finances; and then he ordered the hit job inside the Turkish embassy on the Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
All the while Kushner publicly defended his friend.
So what happens, Wyden asks in a letter to Kushner, in a new Trump administration, if, for example, the Saudis (and his other investors like the UAE and Qatar) threaten to withdraw their investment in Affinity?
A potential future Trump administration will have financial motives to make foreign policy decisions that my be counter to the national interest in order to ensure Kushner and Ivanka Trump continue to collect millions of dollars in fees.
Of course, not only has Kushner not bothered to answer Wyden satisfactorily, he has doubled-down. The couple is even brazenly embarking on a whole new venture: a luxury hotel real estate investment project in the Balkans! – no less – Vladimir Putin’s backyard. The important take-away, Jared told the WSJ recently, was that Ivanka came up with the brilliant idea of partnering with Aman.
In my truly idle moments, I conjure the visual of Sen. Wyden reading about this project, say, over breakfast, and imagine him turning purple…
Anyway, back to Trump and his under-reported interview with Saudi news.
It’s short. Not particularly interesting - and that’s the point.
His off-the-wall remarks about Arnold Palmer’s genitalia are much more attention-grabbing.
And Trump knows that.
This is the Vicky Ward that we need. Incisive, shrewd, thorough.
Total press manipulation. Gotta see new Apprentice movie. Very sharp