On Thanksgiving Day, Donald Trump participated in a teleconference with members of the US military from his Florida resort in Mar-a-Lago.
The chat elicited many an enthusiastic presidential soundbite, such as: "Good old army. We love the army." The good cheer came to an abrupt end, however, during the post-teleconference press briefing, when Trump was forced to field a couple of questions about the October murder of US-based Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul.
Asked whether the CIA was in possession of a recording of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman demanding that Khashoggi be silenced, the president responded: "I don't want to talk about it. You have [to] ask them."
And yet, he did manage to talk at length about how, regardless of who ordered the murder, "we have a very strong ally in Saudi Arabia" - which, in addition to helping make America great in many other ways, had apparently also facilitated Trump's self-marketing as the god of cheap gasoline: "I see that yesterday, [in] one of the papers, I was blamed for causing traffic jams because I have the oil prices so low ... let's have some traffic jams."
Also working in the Saudis' favour, according to Trump's analysis, was that "Israel would be in big trouble without Saudi Arabia" - a statement that generated some backlash from Israelis peeved at the suggestion that anyone but Israel was to thank for staving off big trouble in the world.
Incidentally, Trump's Thanksgiving Day allusion to the Saudi-Israeli alliance - a subject that has generally fallen under the category of Things We Absolutely Do Not Talk About - was merely one of a recent string of similar comments.
In an October interview with the Wall Street Journal, Trump praised Saudi Arabia as "a very good ally with respect to Iran and with respect to Israel". A presidential statementissued on 20 November - headlined with the exclamation "America First!" - once again addressed the centrality of the Saudi kingdom to "our very important fight against Iran," with support for Saudi Arabia being crucial to "ensure the interests of our country, Israel and all other partners in the region".
Among these interests, we are told, is "our paramount goal to fully eliminate the threat of terrorism throughout the world!" But while this may indeed sound like a noble aim, it is presumably not best achieved with the help of the state that has spent the past 70 years terrorising Palestinians, or the one currently presiding over the terrorisation of Yemen (and that also happened to produce 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers). READ MORE AT MIDDLE EAST EYE.