Editor’s note: This commentary is by state Sen. Becca Balint, D-Windham, and the current majority leader in the Senate. She lives in Brattleboro.
[L]ast week a bipartisan group of senior senators emerged from a classified briefing with CIA director Gina Haspel and told the press that Haspel’s testimony had solidified their belief that Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, had ordered the killing of Saudi dissident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Sen. Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee and the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, said there was “no question in my mind” that the crown prince had ordered the killing.
President Donald Trump’s public statement about the murder stands in horribly stark contrast to Corker’s candor. And yes, our president says so many ignorant, false and ridiculous statements that it would be easy to let his exoneration of the Saudi crown prince get lost in the noise. But we must not.
Trump’s statements about the Khashoggi murder must shift our dismay and distress firmly into the column of rank disgust. It is deeply shocking. Please, let it shock you.
Feel the weight of the wrong. Please, shake your head in disbelief. Do not let Trump normalize a premeditated murder and dismemberment of a human being inside a consulate by a U.S. ally. Our president didn’t just side with autocrats. He didn’t just give cover to Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. His public statement made clear that he values a (vastly exaggerated) trade deal with the Saudis more than a human life. He is comfortable with his own moral rot. But more than that, he wants us to be comfortable with it, too.
Fred Ryan, publisher and chief executive of The Washington Post, boils it down to stark, chilling terms: “Flash enough money in front of the president of the United States, and you can literally get away with murder.”
Some in my social media newsfeed have argued that we should not be shocked. They suggest that our personal and collective dismay over journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s killing (and our president’s refusal to confront the truth) reveals a naiveté about the world. They hide behind a kind of sloppy moral relativism that uses our own nation’s previous atrocities as a justification for heinous Saudi actions.
Others, although concerned — even scared and outraged — by Khashoggi’s murder, feel so overwhelmed by the sheer number of public transgressions by this president. But I urge all of us to not become inured to the horror and not to be distracted by other embarrassing (but less substantive) statements or missteps by this president.
According to a Quinnipiac University poll of earlier this year, a majority of Americans are embarrassed by our commander and chief. And 67 percent (that’s two- thirds) of Americans believe Trump has a negative impact on the nation’s children. So, it’s clear that many of us feel a deep shame about this president. As usual, there have been numerous times in the past month when I’ve felt embarrassed by President Trump: the rambling press conference in California in which he misnamed the town that had been destroyed in a horrible, surreal conflagration; his public, childish attack on the Navy Seal who led the operation to capture Osama bin Laden; and his personal attack on a federal judge because of his ruling on asylum-seeking immigrants. Countless other awkward moments, inappropriate tweets, and bald faced lies have grabbed national attention.
But Trump’s response to Khashoggi’s murder falls in a different category entirely. Ryan perfectly dissects a critical aspect of the president’s official statement on Khashoggi’s grisly murder; Trump argues that some in Saudi Arabia viewed Khashoggi as an “enemy of the state” and a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. The president then says, “… but my decision is in no way based on that.” Ryan astutely points out that Trump employs “a rhetorical device know as paralipsis — saying something by professing not to say it.” In this case, Trump unabashedly asserts that the Saudis were justified in luring the journalist into the embassy in order to kill him and chop up his body. Further, he suggests that we are justified in overlooking this lawless murder because it will be good for our economy.
A man — a journalist, a father, a fiancé — was lured into the Saudi consulate in Turkey on the auspices of securing documentation so he could marry. He never came out. Ryan goes to the heart of it for me when he writes that this “makes me want to throw up.”
It is not naive to protest the murder of journalists, activists and truth-tellers; it is fundamental to moral order and civil society. Holding autocrats accountable for their crimes — weeding out the heinous from the ridiculous — is the moral imperative of our times.
