President Trump’s meandering response to the apparent murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi took another turn Tuesday, this time for the even more absurd, when he criticized Saudi Arabia’s response as the “worst cover-up ever.” That’s certainly one way to put it. From that initial statement, made by Trump in the Oval Office, it isn’t totally clear whether Trump means “worst” as in horrific and amoral or just botched. But he cleared that up pretty quickly. “They had a very bad original concept, it was carried out poorly, and the cover-up was one of the worst in the history of cover-ups,” Trump told reporters, sounding like he was laying out the rationale for firing a contestant on an episode of the Apprentice.
Trump seemed piqued by the shambolic attempt to conceal the murder of a journalist, but not all that interested in the actual murder itself. Instead, Trump’s comments Tuesday characterized the hit and planned cover-up as a “bad deal.”
The hits:
“Somebody really messed up,” Trump said. “Because whoever thought of that idea, I think is in big trouble. And they should be in big trouble.”
“However they talk about it, nothing they’ve done has gone well. It certainly has not been spoken of properly,” Trump said of the Saudi response. “The process was no good. the execution was no good. And the cover-up, if you want to call it that, was certainly no good.”
“Very simple,” Trump continued, “Bad deal; should never have been thought of. Somebody really messed up. And they had the worst cover-up ever. And where it should have stopped is at the deal standpoint.”
So where does that leave the Trump administration on the Khashoggi murder? “In terms of what we ultimately do, I’m going to leave it very much—in conjunction with me—I’m going to leave it up to Congress,” Trump said.
