In Courting Saudi Arabia, Trump Emulates Mohammed Bin Salman’s Authoritarianism
Part of the Series
The Public Intellectual
Fascism thrives in societies that grow desensitized to violence. Once cruelty is normalized, political life collapses into a spectacle of force, lies, and corruption. Under such conditions, the humanity of selected populations becomes disposable. Bodies disappear, injustice parades as lawful, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security reveal themselves as having assumed the violent role once played by militia groups, carrying out home invasions, mass detentions, and punitive deportations that leave entire communities traumatized. They operate less like civil agencies and more like state-sanctioned paramilitary forces whose mandate blurs policing with coercion and state terrorism.
The scope and reach of state violence under Donald Trump’s regime is chilling. His so-called “drug boat” killings, conducted without due process or evidence, have resulted in the deaths of more than 80 people he unilaterally labeled terrorists and members of drug cartels. Here, the category of “terrorist” functions as a death sentence, naming individuals who, stripped of legal protections, can be executed at will.
These extrajudicial killings form part of a broader authoritarian project aimed not only at expanding presidential power through militarized violence but also at normalizing the logic of regime change. As Greg Grandinpointed out in Jacobin, the bloodbath in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean cannot be separated from the long-standing racialized drug war in the United States, which for decades has targeted people of color at home while providing cover for U.S. military operations across Latin America. What was once obscured from public view has now become political theater, a stage on which “Donald Trump presides over his own Murder Incorporated, less a government than a death squad.” In this climate, state terrorism is reduced to a bumper sticker and repackaged as a policy virtue to be praised, normalized, and widely disseminated.
What is particularly dangerous and horrifying is how Trump wields the label of “terrorist” domestically, transforming it into an arbitrary mechanism for criminalizing dissent and inflicting violence — including deportations, torture, and even death — on any individual or group he chooses. His deployment of state violence, at home and abroad, is part of a widening assault on the left, made plausible by portraying progressive organizations and critics as existential threats. As Stephen Prager notes in Common Dreams, Trump’s expansion of the terrorism designation exposes U.S. citizens to government surveillance, asset seizure, and material support charges. This strategy was crystallized when Trump formally labeled “antifa” a domestic terrorist organization, even though it is not a formal group but a loose constellation of individuals committed to resisting authoritarianism. Civil rights advocates immediately warned that such a vague designation could be used to prosecute anyone who names the Trump administration as fascist. Soon after, Trump signed the little-reported National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, which mandated a national strategy to investigate, disrupt, and criminalize “networks” allegedly linked to political violence — an open door to target activists, journalists, and critics.
These developments are not isolated policies or rhetorical excesses. They signal a political worldview in which violence becomes the defining grammar of governance. Once violence is normalized as a tool of statecraft, and once entire populations can be designated as enemies without evidence or due process, the boundaries between domestic policing, foreign assassination, and authoritarian rule collapse. This collapse is precisely where fascism takes root: at the moment when cruelty becomes policy, when the state’s power to kill is hidden beneath the language of “security,” and when leaders reward rather than condemn those who commit unspeakable crimes.
It is within this expanding landscape of state-sanctioned terror and moral disintegration that Trump’s recent meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman must be understood. The meeting between a U.S. president and the Saudi strongman — who, according to a damning forensic UN report, ordered the dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi — is no anomaly. It is a chilling marker of the political direction the United States is now taking. This encounter with bin Salman exposes both Trump’s unreserved embrace of dictatorship and his dangerous ambition to steer the U.S. down the same dangerous road. In this unsettling alliance between Trump and bin Salman, the specter of violence and authoritarianism draws nearer, as if the shadows of history are once again stirring to life, not as a past we have learned from, but as a future we are rushing toward.
As Tony Judt warned in Ill Fares the Land, societies enthralled by the “pursuit of material self-interest” and the drive for unchecked power lose the moral language required for democratic life and slip into what he called a “moral wilderness,” a modern form of brutality. Trump’s embrace of a ruler who treats the free press as expendable exemplifies this descent. It reflects precisely what Judt described: governments drained of social purpose, turning instead toward punishment, cruelty, and repression as organizing principles of power.
Trump made this collapse unmistakable. He not only defended bin Salman, claiming, in defiance of a 2021 U.S. intelligence report, that the crown prince “knew nothing” about the assassination, he went further, seeming to justify the murder by calling Khashoggi “controversial” and stating, “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.” Bin Salman dismissed the killing as a mere “mistake.” Such grotesque rationalizations reveal a political culture that has grown comfortable with the idea that journalists can be eliminated and that state violence is simply another tool of governance. In a further flight from both reality and the truth, Trump stated, “I’m very proud of the job he’s done. What he’s done is incredible in terms of human rights and everything else.”
Trump’s statement is truly alarming given the breadth, scope, and relentless enactment of political violence in Saudi Arabia. Organizations from Freedom House to Human Rights Watch have provided ample documentation of massive violations of human rights in Saudi Arabia. The list is as extensive as it is morally repulsive.
The monarchy silences dissent, offering no space for elected voices or critical perspectives. Journalists, women’s rights activists, and social media critics are routinely detained in secretive prisons, where they face isolation and erasure. At the fringes of these abuses, Saudi forces carry out border killings of Ethiopian migrants and asylum seekers — acts that may amount to crimes against humanity. The country’s courts continue to impose death sentences for nonviolent political dissent and social media activity, as well as for drug offenses, even though international norms restrict the death penalty to the most heinous crimes. Migrant workers, bound by the oppressive kafala system, endure exploitative conditions, paying exorbitant recruitment fees, suffering from extreme heat, and working without pay, while state authorities fail to hold abusive employers accountable.
Both bin Salman and Trump share a contempt for truth, an oppositional press, and any form of criticism that challenges their authority.
Amnesty International notes that Saudi authorities “have adopted a zero-tolerance policy for any criticism, no matter how innocuous,” adding that all human rights groups have been shuttered, effectively erasing any independent civil society. Since bin Salman’s rise to power, the human rights situation has “deteriorated drastically.” Harsh prison sentences for even mild social media commentary, record-level executions, and death sentences for expression alone illustrate a regime that has turned brutality into state policy.
Both bin Salman and Trump share a contempt for truth, an oppositional press, and any form of criticism that challenges their authority. Bin Salman represents where such repression inevitably leads. Trump rehearses the same authoritarian script, if in a more chaotic register. He routinely berates and humiliates journalists who ask uncomfortable questions. When ABC’s Mary Bruce pressed Trump about his business ties to the kingdom, he lashed out, calling her “a terrible person and a terrible reporter” and branding ABC “fake news.” His crude dismissal mirrored the contempt he showed other journalists, including referring to one journalist as “piggy” when questioned about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. These gestures are not incidental. They legitimize a global atmosphere in which journalism has become a dangerous profession, nowhere more so than in Gaza, where 240 journalists have been killed by Israeli forces, some “considered legitimate military targets.”
This moral free fall reached its most revealing moment when Bruce confronted bin Salman directly:
Your Royal Highness, the U.S. intelligence concluded that you orchestrated the brutal murder of a journalist. 9/11 families are furious that you are here in the Oval Office. Why should Americans trust you? And the same to you, Mr. President.
In the face of a question invoking the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi, a journalist murdered and literally cut to pieces for telling the truth, Trump did not express outrage or even discomfort. He snapped, smeared Bruce’s employer, and rushed to defend his family’s financial entanglements with the Saudi regime. In that moment, the Oval Office became a stage for authoritarian pedagogy: the evasion of justice, the protection of those who commit unspeakable crimes, and the public degradation of anyone who insists on moral reckoning. This is fascist pedagogy in real time: the rejection of accountability, the public degradation of truth, and the shielding of those who commit unspeakable crimes.
Trump’s performance was no mere theater; it was the public staging of the U.S.’s descent into moral collapse. It is the full realization of Judt’s warning that a society which “knows what things cost but has no idea what they are worth” becomes one in which human life, journalism, and democratic norms are reduced to expendable commodities. Here, before the world, cruelty was normalized and murder excused. What unfolded in that room was more than a meeting between two authoritarian figures, it was the public enactment of the U.S.’s moral collapse. It revealed how neoliberal opportunism fuses seamlessly with authoritarian terror, and how quickly a democracy, hollowed of ethical conviction, can drift into a political order where cruelty becomes the governing ethic.
We are not confronting a future danger so much as an unfolding present. The conditions for democratic collapse are already here.
What this exchange between Trump and bin Salman ultimately revealed was a moment when fascism shed its disguises and displayed itself without apology, offering cruelty, censorship, and violence as a governing philosophy. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben warned in his 1998 book Homo Sacer that the concentration camp had become “the fundamental political paradigm of the West,” a metaphor for a world where human beings can be stripped of rights, reduced to expendable life, and abandoned to sovereign violence. What once felt like a distant warning and provocation now takes shape before our eyes, tangible and terrifying. The architecture of authoritarianism is no longer a distant threat or a cautionary tale from another era; it is emerging in the daily erosion of democratic norms, the demonization of dissent, and the casual acceptance of state terror.
One instance of this erosion was on full display in another but more chilling and spectacular willingness of Trump to criminalize dissent. On his Truth Social platform, Trump suggested on November 20 that Democratic lawmakers who urged the military to refuse illegal orders could be executed, calling them “traitors” and accusing them of “seditious behavior,” adding, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” This reckless suggestion echoes the fascist tendencies within his rhetoric, signaling a dangerous call for violence and the politicization of death sentences. In response to backlash, Trump tried to backtrack somewhat on November 21, claiming that he’s “not threatening death” toward the Democratic lawmakers, but that doesn’t change the fact that some lawmakers are already being targeted with death threats in the wake of Trump’s original post. Such statements are not isolated incidents but part of a broader strategy to intimidate, silence, and eliminate any opposition through the endorsement of violent, illegal practices — practices fully embraced by Saudi Arabia.
We are not confronting a future danger so much as an unfolding present. The conditions for democratic collapse are already here, settling into the rhythms of everyday life. They demand from us not quiet reflection but an urgency equal to the scale of the crisis, an awakening capable of breaking through cynicism, fear, and manufactured despair. Resistance can no longer remain a discourse, a gesture, or a hope deferred. It must become a collective force, waged with the conviction that democracy survives only when people refuse to surrender their moral imagination, their solidarity, and their willingness to fight for a world in which human life cannot be reduced to disposable matter.