The Oval Office press gaggle on Tuesday with President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia presented an unusual scene.
The 40-year-old prince — who at one point had imprisoned his own relatives in a Ritz-Carlton hotel — came off as relatively staid and reasonable. After fielding some tough questions with ease, he spent much of the gathering sitting quietly, hands in his lap.
Mr. Trump, however, ranted, berating a journalist whose question he said was “insubordinate” and calling the Federal Reserve chairman a “stupid man.” He also raved, telling the prince “what an honor it is to be your friend.”
It was almost as if, sitting beside a famously authoritarian leader, the president wanted to prove his own mettle. Mr. Trump — who has spoken admiringly of autocrats for decades — reveled in the softball questions tossed by Saudi-owned media outlets and called for revoking ABC’s broadcast license.
The stark juxtaposition between the two men said as much about the political turmoil in the United States over the past decade as it did about Prince Mohammed, who has undergone his own transformation from a brash upstart to a shrewd and powerful leader in the same time period.
“His ten plus years in office have clearly put a stamp on him,” said Bader Al-Saif, an assistant professor of history at Kuwait University. “Coming across as a mature statesman was particularly aided by the contrast in the U.S. president right next to him.”
During Mr. Trump’s first term, Prince Mohammed was still rising to power in Saudi Arabia, pushing aside powerful opponents to become the de facto ruler of the oil-rich kingdom. Just 29 years old when his father became king in 2015, he swiftly earned a reputation as reckless — although he preferred to describe himself as a disrupter, telling journalists that he was inspired by tech entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg.
Months after being appointed as Saudi Arabia’s defense minister, he oversaw a disastrous bombing campaign in Yemen that precipitated one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
He used trade as a weapon, targeting Germany and Canada over perceived insults. In 2017, his henchmen effectively kidnapped the prime minister of Lebanon, forcing him to resign on Saudi television. Prince Mohammed also suppressed domestic dissent, overseeing the imprisonment of hundreds of activists, businesspeople, royal family members and scholars across the political spectrum. The crackdown reached its peak in 2018, when Saudi agents killed and dismembered Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist, in Istanbul. That crackdown continues today, more quietly.
For a brief period after the killing, Prince Mohammed was a global pariah. As the years passed, though, he made his way back onto the world stage — too powerful to ignore. His visit to the United States this week was his first since 2018. In recent years, he has behaved more cautiously in the public eye, rebuilding his image as a deal-maker and influential investor.
Some of that shift has been driven by realities in Saudi Arabia. He has set a 2030 deadline to transform the oil-dependent kingdom’s economy and society and turn the country into a global hub for business and tourism. Regional chaos would impede those efforts. So instead of inflaming conflicts, he has often turned to diplomacy.
The Saudi government is also facing a cash crunch that has forced the prince and his top aides to reckon with their spending. He has begun to scale back some of his more fantastical ambitions — like hiring Hollywood art directors to help design a science-fiction inspired region called Neom — in favor of more practical plans, like building data centers as he invests heavily in artificial intelligence.
During the same time period, the U.S. — Saudi Arabia’s most important ally — has experienced greater polarization and intensifying political violence. Now, the American president, like the prince before him, is using trade as a weapon and cracking down on dissent.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has drawn from the well-worn playbook of authoritarians around the world, using law enforcement to target political opponents, loosening the definition of terrorism and firing officials who present inconvenient data. Mr. Trump has said he is merely giving Americans what they want.
“I’m not a dictator,” he said in August. “I’m a man with great common sense and I’m a smart person.”
When a reporter asked Prince Mohammed on Tuesday about a U.S. intelligence assessment that he had likely ordered Mr. Khashoggi’s killing, Mr. Trump insulted the reporter and brushed off the murder by saying that “things happen.”
But Prince Mohammed calmly interjected. “Allow me to answer,” he said, adding that the killing had been “painful” and a “huge mistake.”
Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
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