.png)
The White House is Golden decor and the Banquet Table is set for a Saudi Prince of Death
Even on the days when I try—genuinely try—to soften my contempt for the vile disregard shown to the American people by an Administration with no shame in its debauchery, the universe reminds me why my temperance fails.
I tell myself: Grace, write lighter today. Dance. Sing. Share a happy distraction. And then—there it is. A photograph dripping in gold leaf, casino-bright opulence, the White House staged like a gilded palace. A Trumptian ruler lounging beside his Saudi financier, wrapped in an aesthetic that screams excess, arrogance, and transactional power.
We are not just talking about decor. We are talking about a set piece. Gold walls, gold chairs, gold table settings—a golden theater built to frame a moment where power congratulates itself. And at that table sits a man whose wealth and influence were never truly separate from the brutal silencing of one journalist’s voice.
Then I watch him turn on Mary Bruce, the ABC reporter whose only offense was asking the questions any functioning democracy requires:
Mr. President, how much will your family profit from this allegiance with the Saudi Crown Prince? And how do you sit here hosting the man U.S. intelligence concluded approved the killing of a Washington Post journalist?2
And what does he offer back to the American public? The most cowardly shrug of moral responsibility ever uttered from a modern head of state:
“Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t.”
“Saudi Arabia is a great ally.”
“We’re not going to give up billions of dollars in arms deals.”
The Murder the World Was Supposed to Forget
The journalist he is so casually referencing is Jamal Khashoggi, veteran Saudi insider, reformist critic, and columnist for The Washington Post. In October 2018, Khashoggi walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to obtain papers for his upcoming marriage—and never walked out.1
A 15-man Saudi team flew in just hours before he arrived—intelligence officers, members of the royal guard, and a forensic doctor. Turkish surveillance, leaked transcripts, and later investigations pieced together what happened: Khashoggi was strangled, killed, and dismembered. His remains have never been found.1
The UN Special Rapporteur called it a premeditated, extrajudicial killing for which the Saudi state bears responsibility.1 U.S. intelligence agencies assessed with high confidence that the Crown Prince approved the operation.2 This is not rumor; it is recorded in the sober language of official findings.
And again, these thoughts affirm what may have been an unconscious awareness forming long before I could articulate it. I wasn’t tracking every headline with exacting precision at the time—life was happening, the world was loud, and politics had already exhausted our collective nerves. But as the media escalated the search for Jamal Khashoggi, something inside me shifted.
Then came the reports of the audio. The taping. The recording inside the Embassy.
The screams. The terror in his voice. The sound—unmistakable, sickening—of a saw tearing through a human body.
It was horror that could not be un-heard, even in mere description. A violence so intimate and barbaric that once the world knew, it etched itself into the global conscience. It didn’t matter whether we tried to look away; the truth had already carved itself into memory.
This was not geopolitics. This was not diplomacy. This was a man’s life taken in the most brutal manner imaginable—and a crime the world was quietly invited to forget for the sake of alliances, arms deals, and gold-plated theatrics.
Why This Matters Today
Because what we are witnessing is the normalization of impunity.
When a journalist is murdered, dismembered, and erased from the earth—and the world’s most powerful democracy shrugs it off in exchange for “billions in arms deals”—we are no longer talking about foreign policy. We are talking about the collapse of democratic ethics.
When the White House becomes a gilded stage for transactional loyalties, it tells every autocrat watching:
If you bring the money, the morality is negotiable.
This isn’t only about Saudi Arabia. It’s about the pattern:
- The U.S. Embassy in Trinidad and Tobago assuring locals that Marines “just doing joint exercises” pose no concern—even as heavy artillery faces Venezuela.
- The unspoken message that military maneuvers, oil interests, and foreign alliances take precedence over transparency and trust.
- A foreign policy conducted in shadows, spectacle, and weaponized pomp.
The world sees the contradiction: a journalist murdered in a consulate; a president who defended the killer; and now a gilded reunion broadcast as statesmanship.
From the Consulate to the Banquet Table
That is why this banquet photograph is not just an image; it is an indictment. The same man whose final moments were reportedly captured in a consulate, screaming in terror as a team went to work on his body, is now reduced to a footnote in the background noise of clinking glassware and diplomatic toasts.1
The soundscape has been edited. The screams are replaced by polite laughter. The whine of a saw is overwritten by the soft scrape of gold cutlery on fine china. The consulate becomes the prelude; the banquet is the attempted rewrite. The message is simple: we can do this, and still be welcomed at the table.
And from the Caribbean shorelines, that message lands with a different weight. There is a quiet, gnawing fear that if this Administration escalates military operations in our region—under whatever pretext, be it “joint exercises” or “targeted strikes”—the collateral damage will not be measured in headlines, but in bodies. The notion that human remains could one day wash up near the shores of Trinidad and Tobago is not a cinematic exaggeration; it is a nightmare scenario that would be, to those in vaulted rooms of power, a trivial byline, a cost of doing business.
But for us, for the Caribbean, for the communities who live and fish and dream along these coasts, that would be a wound lasting generations.
This is not theater. It is precedent. And precedent becomes the template for the future.
When truth is disposable and justice negotiable, the loudest message is simple: power protects itself, not the people. The White House can shimmer in gold all it likes; the shine does not cleanse the blood from the story.
Endnotes
-
UN Special Rapporteur Investigation (2019).
The official inquiry by Agnes Callamard concluded that Jamal Khashoggi was the victim of a "premeditated extrajudicial execution for which the State of Saudi Arabia is responsible." Full report summary:
https://www.ohchr.org/…/killing-jamal-khashoggi -
U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), Declassified Assessment (2021).
The U.S. intelligence community assessed with high confidence that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill Khashoggi. Full PDF:
https://www.dni.gov/…/Khashoggi-2021.pdf
Comments
Post a Comment