Saturday’s Trump-world blowups: Riyadh receipts and Russia smoke

Edition · May 20, 2017

Saturday’s Trump-world blowups: Riyadh receipts and Russia smoke

On May 20, 2017, Trump’s first foreign trip was supposed to project strength. Instead, it fused ceremonial pageantry with fresh questions about cash, influence, and the Russia cloud hanging over the White House.

Trump’s first stop in Saudi Arabia delivered a massive arms-and-relationship showcase, but it also reinforced the administration’s habit of wrapping foreign policy, family ties, and business interests into one uncomfortably glossy package. At the same time, the Russia fallout from James Comey’s firing kept metastasizing, with fresh attention on what Trump told Russian officials and why his White House seemed to be treating a counterintelligence crisis like a PR problem.

Closing take

May 20 was less a clean diplomatic debut than a reminder that this White House kept stepping on the same rake: grand spectacle on the outside, avoidable scandal on the inside. The Saudi trip promised dealmaking and delivered new scrutiny; the Russia mess promised containment and delivered more suspicion. Not exactly the kind of foreign-policy brand launch you put on a commemorative coin.

Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

5 stars means maximum fallout. 1 star means a smaller self-own.

Story

The Comey firing keeps boomeranging on Trump

Russia boomerang Confidence 5/5

★★★★★Fuckup rating 5/5 Five-alarm fuckup

The biggest political problem hanging over Trump on May 20 was still the one he created on May 9: firing James Comey while the FBI’s Russia probe was active. Fresh reporting had the White House scrambling to explain what Trump told Russian officials about that dismissal, and that only intensified suspicion that the president was treating a criminal investigation as a personal annoyance. The more the administration denied there was a problem, the more it looked like it was hiding from the scale of the problem. That is how you turn a personnel move into a constitutional headache. ([time.com](https://time.com/4786698/president-trump-james-russia-comey-nut-job/?utm_source=openai))

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Story

Trump’s Saudi showcase turns into a giant arms-and-influence bet

Saudi optics Confidence 4/5

★★★☆☆Fuckup rating 3/5 Major mess

Trump’s first foreign trip opened in Riyadh with the kind of pomp the White House clearly wanted: handshakes, choreography, and a big announcement about defense and commercial commitments. But the event also looked like a sprawling influence operation in real time, with the president praising Saudi leaders while the administration sold the package as a historic win for U.S. industry and security. The problem was not just the size of the deal; it was the image of a presidency eager to fuse diplomacy, salesmanship, and personal-brand theater. That made the rollout vulnerable to criticism that the administration was papering over Saudi abuses and long-running concerns about what exactly Washington was buying into. ([aljazeera.com](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/5/20/us-and-saudi-arabia-sign-arms-deals-worth-almost-110bn?utm_source=openai))

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