Hussein Ibish
speaker
241 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard May 2025
last heard 26 May
Hussein Ibish’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There's also a cryptocurrency scheme connected to his sons in which a UAE-linked company has just agreed to invest $2 billion, with a B, $2 billion. The company is not going to look the same after this trip. It's going to go from being very successful for its size, mom-and-pop shop, built on the vast inheritance that Trump's had from his father, Fred. But now he's taking it into the stratosphere.
I mean, the amount of financial clout that's coming to his family-owned, privately held business is just amazing. And what the Arabs are doing here is buying goodwill. It's an investment. It's an investment in Trump as a friend. and, you know, ultimately also with the U.S. But right now, Trump has, you know, instituted l'État c'est moi. He is the country and the country is him.
And until somebody stops him or until he leaves the White House, that's the way it's going to be. And this is very understandable to a group of people who deal in patron-client relations as a matter of course.
Exactly. They get protection, and he gets money, we get money.
Well, it's the absolute, I was waiting for you to bring it up, because it is exactly the kind of icon, the avatar of this trip. It says it all. Qatar, which is an unbelievably rich country, 300,000, maybe 400,000 citizens. Most of the country, between 2 and 3 million people, are expat laborers, foreign workers, Arab and Western technocrats.
But collectively, those 350,000 or so Qataris are the largest single exporter in the world of liquid natural gas. And obviously, all of the wealth goes to the citizens. I mean, it's just amazing. You've never seen a country with this level of per capita wealth. And it uses that money for national interest. In this case, what they've done is one of the former prime ministers, who is a royal,
has a jet, a luxury Boeing 747 that's kitted out, not for a president, but for a wealthy man who enjoys luxury travel on his own private plane. So what the Qataris have done is they've said, you can have the plane. for use as president while you're in office. And after that, it will be transferred to your presidential library, meaning he could still use it after that.
So it's sort of been... They've very cleverly muddied the waters or blurred the line between private and public here in order to give this plane to Donald Trump as an individual, and they can say... that they haven't, that they've given it to his presidency.
Yeah, well, in a lot of ways, I think that's true. I remember a certain high-ranking, formerly very high-ranking Gulf individual who said just as much in 2016 after he was elected. They said he does the same things, and he listed a bunch of verbs that were unlawful actions and said, we do that and he does that. It's not obviously unlawful in their countries.
It's normative, but traditionally not allowed in the United States and in Western countries in general. And I think this man was absolutely correct when he said, we do this and he does that. We do this and he does that. And that they would feel very comfortable with him. They certainly would disagree about how much pressure he should put on Israel regarding Gaza. Things like that.
But I was thinking yesterday that there's really no daylight. between Trump's positions on all the really most important issues and those of Saudi Arabia. You can't find a major irritant there, which is really amazing. Such as what? What issues? Well, I mean, anything you think of.
The war in Ukraine, the nature of U.S.-Saudi relations, how business should be conducted, the Yemen war, talks with Iran, they both want a deal. They convinced him that lifting the sanctions on Syria was a good idea. They just agree more or less on just about any issue. And that can change overnight, because if there was a spike in oil prices, they would disagree right away.
But I was contrasting that in my mind with the problems that the US and Trump have with Israel right now, where there's disagreement about Gaza, about the ceasefire with the Houthis, about the talks with Iran. about the negotiations with Hamas. There are many irritants. Now, that's not to say the US is closer to Saudi Arabia than it is Israel. I don't think that's true.
The Israeli relationship with the US is very deeply ingrained and protected by political influence in the US, especially from evangelical Christians on the right. But yeah, I think Trump is sort of ideal in many ways from, say, a Saudi point of view.
administrations, whether they're Republican or Democrat, they do bring it up. Trump doesn't.
At all.
Well, I mean, yeah, well, I mean, MBS has learned. One of the big questions about him when he was a young, rash leader in, you know, beginning in 2015 when he came in as defense minister and a quick rise to where he is now, which is head of government, that is to say he's the prime minister. Saudi Arabia. So he runs the government.
And human rights issues became very serious in his early years with the arrest of the dissidents, the sort of adventure in Yemen that was ill-advised and badly done, to put it mildly, and also the jailing of Important people who are not perhaps on board fully with the changes, the reforms, the social liberalization, or other concerns that MBS had about them who were jailed at the Ritz-Carlton.
I was coming to that. That's the big enchilada, right, for many people, including me, because he was a friend of mine for 15 years. And I, you know, I was just, I'm still scarred by it. And I think I always will be. MBS, what we've learned about him is that He's not a sociopath in the sense that he's educable.
The question about him was always, is he young and rash and doing these things because he doesn't know better? Or is he kind of nuts? And the answer is no. He's educable. He's evolving. He's maturing. Saudi Arabia remains educable.
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