"Things Happen"

Two words he said about a bone saw. Sit with them before you scroll past.

Two words. That is all it took.

President Donald Trump said two words about the man who ordered the execution of Jamal Khashoggi. He said them from the Oval Office, inches from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and he said them with a shrug.

Things happen.

I have spent more than four decades in courtrooms. I have watched defendants lie under oath. I have watched grieving widows described as inconveniences. Nothing in those decades prepared me for a sitting American president waving off a journalist’s dismemberment by bone saw like someone spilled a drink in his restaurant.

I want to take you back through what happened. Not as breaking news. Not as a hot take. As a receipt.

The Regime Your President Called A Great Friend

Saudi Arabia is the regime we are talking about. Write these numbers down.

Saudi authorities executed 345 people in 2024, the highest in kingdom history. They broke their own record the following year with 356. Reprieve and the European Saudi Organization for Human Rights confirmed that number through official Saudi press releases. The 2024 and 2025 numbers are the bloodiest two years in the last five decades of Saudi monitoring. More than half of those killed were foreign nationals. Roughly 240 died for nonviolent drug offenses in a single year.

In June 2025, Saudi authorities killed journalist Turki al Jasser. He had run an anonymous social media account exposing royal family corruption. Saudi security forces raided his home in 2018, seized his devices, and made him disappear. For seven years his family heard almost nothing. Then the Interior Ministry posted a terse notice of his death under vague terrorism charges. Al Jasser became the first journalist Saudi Arabia executed by judicial decision under Mohammed bin Salman.

The second journalist killed by the regime. Jamal Khashoggi was the first.

The man who ordered both sat next to your president in the Oval Office and received the full honor guard treatment. Six American fighter jets flew over the South Lawn. It’s also reported that Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Cristiano Ronaldo attended the East Room dinner. A cannon salute went off. Flag bearers on horseback escorted a black Mercedes sedan up the driveway.

Here is the part that should really bother you.

When ABC News reporter Mary Bruce asked Trump about the Khashoggi murder, the president snapped. He called her network fake news. He told her not to embarrass his guest. He described Khashoggi, the slain United States resident who had written for the Washington Post, as extremely controversial and said a lot of people didn’t like that gentleman. Then he said the two words you now know.

Things happen.

Mohammed bin Salman rewarded him for the cover. The crown prince bumped Saudi Arabia’s pledged American investment from $600 billion to $1 trillion. Cash for silence. Silence for cash.

It’s noted that Hanan Elatr Khashoggi, Jamal’s widow, reached out to the White House and also posted a public message on X before the visit. She asked Trump to press the Saudi government to return her husband’s body so she could perform a religious burial. She asked him to raise financial compensation for her, similar to the treatment of the 9/11 families.

Trump did not raise it. He praised MBS. A widow asking for her husband’s remains was apparently worth less than a trillion dollar check.

Qatar Behind The Glossy Brochure

Now about Qatar, the other half of this equation. Qatar sells itself as modern and open. The 2022 World Cup commercials. The Western university campuses. The airline with the good business class.

Scratch the paint.

Qatar is an absolute monarchy. Ninety one percent of its population consists of migrant workers trapped inside a sponsorship system Human Rights Watch continues to document as abusive in its World Report. Wage theft. Unexplained deaths. Workers criminalized as absconders for leaving employers to escape abuse. Employers confiscating passports without punishment. Women locked inside a male guardianship system requiring permission to marry, travel abroad, hold many government jobs, or study on scholarships. LGBTQ people face prison under criminal statutes punishing same sex conduct, with courts empowered to apply Sharia interpretations allowing death sentences for men.

This is the regime your president called a steadfast ally. This is the regime he pledged American military force to defend.

The Flying Palace Funded By Your Nuclear Budget

Then we have the jet.

You heard something about a Qatari gift. Here is what actually happened. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Qatar’s Minister of State for Defense formally accepting a Boeing 747-8 as an unconditional donation. Read those words. Unconditional. No strings. No conditions. Nothing in the agreement requires the plane to stay with the United States government after Trump leaves office.

The Air Force confirmed the aircraft, redesignated the VC-25B Bridge Aircraft, began test flights over Texas under the call sign VADER01. Delivery is expected by summer 2026. The conversion costs are classified. Senators estimate the retrofit will run hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars. Air Force Secretary Troy Meink told the Senate the money was pulled from the Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program, the one upgrading the land leg of our nuclear deterrent.

Stop. Reread the previous paragraph.

Your nuclear modernization budget, the one designed to keep American cities safe from a Russian or Chinese first strike, was raided to retrofit a luxury jet gifted by a foreign monarchy to a president whose personal foundation is positioned to take ownership of the plane after he leaves office.

The Foreign Emoluments Clause was written for exactly this moment. Article I, Section 9, Clause 8 prohibits any federal officer from accepting any present, emolument, office, or title of any kind from any King, Prince, or foreign State, without the consent of Congress.

Trump ignored all of this.

Attorney General Pam Bondi, a former lobbyist for the Qatari government reportedly paid around $115,000 per month in her prior role through her company, Ballard Partners, signed off on an Office of Legal Counsel memo green lighting the acceptance. The Freedom of the Press Foundation sued the DOJ to release the memo. The DOJ responded by saying it would take 620 days to produce a single document.

The plane is still being modified as you read this.

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Ten Billion In Saudi Real Estate While In Office

Eric Trump and Dar Global, the international arm of a Saudi based property developer closely tied to the Saudi government, unveiled $10 billion in new Trump branded real estate deals inside Saudi Arabia. Walk through them with me.

A multi-billion Trump International Golf Club and residential community in Wadi Safar, inside the $63 billion Diriyah project funded by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Trump toured the site personally with MBS. Jerry Inzerillo, the Diriyah CEO, described Saudi officials pitching the project to Trump as a developer during a state dinner, showing him architectural models at the table. He loved it. Five hundred mansions priced between $6.7 million and $24 million started construction.

A second Trump Plaza in Jeddah. Trump townhouses. A private park. Another billion dollar development.

More Trump branded towers coming to Oman, more to the UAE, more to Qatar, more expansion of the original Doha golf resort.

Let the weight of this land. A sitting American president’s family was the named partner in billion dollar projects with a Saudi state connected developer. The same president made foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia. He approved F-35 fighter sales. He pledged civilian nuclear cooperation. He stayed silent about the executions of journalists. He brushed off the murder of a United States resident. His children collected royalties from the regime asking for those favors.

In legal terms, this is called an undisclosed financial interest in a matter before a public official. In everyday language, this is called a bribe.

Crypto, Stablecoins, And A Pardon For The Money Launderer

Then there is the cryptocurrency corridor.

World Liberty Financial, a decentralized finance venture co founded by Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Barron Trump, and Zach Witkoff (son of Trump’s Middle East Envoy Steve Witkoff), launched a stablecoin called USD1. At a conference in Dubai, Eric Trump and Zach Witkoff announced that MGX, an Abu Dhabi state owned investment firm, had selected USD1 to settle a $2 billion investment in Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.

Think about the parties. An Emirati sovereign wealth vehicle. A crypto exchange previously fined $4.3 billion by the Justice Department for enabling money laundering. A stablecoin controlled by the American president’s family. The Wall Street Journal later reported Binance itself helped write the code behind USD1.

A foreign government funneled two billion dollars through a Trump family financial product into a crypto company that had previously admitted to serving Hamas and Hezbollah. Senators Elizabeth Warren and Jeff Merkley demanded records and called it a direct conflict of interest presenting significant threats to our financial system.

Months later, Trump pardoned Binance founder Changpeng Zhao. CZ had pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. He had served four months in prison. His exchange had become one of the biggest backers of the Trump family crypto operation.

Frank Bowman, a University of Missouri law professor who studies presidential pardons, called it perhaps, at the time, the most overtly corrupt pardon in American history. His words, not mine.

The families of October 7 Hamas attack victims later sued Binance in federal court in North Dakota. They alleged the exchange knowingly facilitated more than $50 million in transactions for Hamas, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad after the attacks on Israel.

Trump told 60 Minutes he did not know CZ. He said he was too busy to pay attention to his sons’ business.

Kushner’s Saudi Pipeline

Jared Kushner runs a Miami based private equity firm called Affinity Partners. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund handed Affinity two billion dollars six months after Kushner left the White House the first time. The PIF’s own investment committee recommended against the deal, citing Kushner’s inexperience, excessive fees, and public relations risks. MBS personally overruled the committee.

Affinity has collected over $157 million in management fees from foreign sovereigns, including $87 million from Saudi Arabia alone, without delivering returns to investors.

Affinity then brokered the introduction for the largest leveraged buyout in the history of business. A consortium led by Saudi Arabia’s PIF, Silver Lake Partners, and Affinity agreed to acquire Electronic Arts, the video game publisher behind Madden NFL, The Sims, FIFA, and Battlefield, for $55 billion. Affinity took a five percent equity stake. Kushner provided political cover for the CFIUS review, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States run by Trump cabinet officials.

Kushner was simultaneously volunteering as an unpaid envoy working on Israel, Gaza, Russia, Ukraine, and Iran policy at the president’s request. He was raising a second Affinity fund, again marketing primarily to Gulf sovereigns.

The son in law of the president was working as a private investment advisor for foreign governments and as a diplomatic envoy for the American government at the same time. Public reporting indicated Affinity also pursued real estate deals with the Serbian and Albanian governments. Senator Ron Wyden concluded that the arrangement looked less like private equity and more like a compensation scheme designed to circumvent the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

In plain English, the president’s son in law looked like an unregistered foreign agent.

The Executive Order Nobody Is Talking About

Here is the piece most Americans missed entirely. Israel struck targets inside Doha aimed at Hamas leadership gathered to discuss a United States ceasefire proposal. Six people died, including a Qatari security officer. Three weeks later, Trump signed an executive order titled Assuring the Security of the State of Qatar.

Read the text. The order commits the United States to regard any armed attack on the territory, sovereignty, or critical infrastructure of Qatar as a threat to American peace and security. It commits the government to take all lawful and appropriate measures including military force. Legal scholars at the Council on Foreign Relations and Just Security compared the language directly to NATO Article 5 and the mutual defense treaties binding the United States to Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines.

A sitting president unilaterally committed American soldiers to fight for an absolute monarchy. No Senate vote. No treaty. No public deliberation. No Congressional authorization. A signature on White House letterhead.

The same president whose family had inked $10 billion in projects with Gulf partners. The same president whose presidential foundation stood to gain a $400 million Qatari jet. The same president whose son in law collected tens of millions in management fees from Qatari sovereign wealth.

Your sons and daughters in uniform now have a contingency plan to bleed for Qatar. Not because Qatar is a democracy. Not because Qatar defends human rights. Not because Qatar shares American values.

Because the commander in chief’s family needed the revenue.

Why You Should Care

I know this feels overwhelming. I know corruption at this scale numbs the brain. Let me bring it down to your kitchen table.

You work. You pay taxes. You drop your kids off at school hoping the country they inherit has some integrity left inside its bones. Every piece of what I described touches your life whether you see it or not.

American foreign policy got bent around Trump family business interests. American soldiers got volunteered for conflicts with no Congressional debate. American credibility on human rights, one of the few tools we have to pressure tyrants into freeing political prisoners, got auctioned off for a plane, a golf course, and a crypto token. When Washington stops speaking for human dignity, dictators everywhere read the signal. They clamp down harder. Wars become more likely. Refugees flow. Oil prices spike. Your 401(k) wobbles. Your children’s futures get shakier.

Closer to home, the message Trump was sending is the thing I want you to focus on.

He admired MBS, who jails critics, severs hands in Chop Chop Square, and beheads journalists. He admired Vladimir Putin, who poisons opponents. He admired Xi Jinping, who crushes Uighurs and Hong Kongers. He admired Kim Jong Un, who rules a concentration camp the size of Pennsylvania. Our own president watched how these men rule. He took notes. He said so out loud.

He floated using the military on American streets. He directed the Justice Department to investigate political opponents. He fired inspectors general. He attacked federal judges by name. He punished law firms representing his critics. He targeted universities, reporters, prosecutors, and private citizens who had annoyed him. He talked about running for a third term in violation of the Twenty Second Amendment.

The same playbook running in Riyadh and Doha started running in your America.

I have watched the rule of law in this country for four decades from inside the courthouse. The system is durable. It is also not indestructible. What we have inside the Constitution is a piece of paper with real words on it and a set of institutions staffed by humans willing to enforce those words. When the president makes the institutions kneel through fear, loyalty tests, and financial capture, the paper loses its teeth. The words become suggestions. The Republic becomes a performance.

What You Do Tomorrow Morning

You are not helpless. You have a voice. You have a vote. You have friends and family who listen to you. Here is what you do this week.

Say the quiet part out loud. A president accepting foreign money, foreign jets, foreign real estate deals, foreign crypto liquidity, and foreign equity positions, while setting American foreign policy, is a national security threat. Full stop. Say those exact words at dinner. Say them at work. Say them to your Republican uncle and your Democratic neighbor. No one serves two masters. Trump’s Saudi, Qatari, and Emirati income was incompatible with American sovereignty. Period.

Pressure Congress. Every senator. Every representative. Every party. Ask them in writing, at town halls, on the phone what they are doing about the Emoluments Clause, the Qatari jet, the USD1 stablecoin, the MGX Binance pipeline, the Saudi real estate deals, the EA acquisition, the CZ pardon, and the unilateral security commitment to Qatar. The House has resolutions demanding compliance sitting on committee desks. The Senate has withheld consent for the jet transfer. Congressional hearings and subpoenas are the minimum decent floor. Impeachment remains on the table. Reminding elected officials their jobs depend on your vote is the fastest way to move them. Here are some methods, templates and links to help you do this.

Fund the watchdogs. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. American Oversight. Freedom of the Press Foundation. State Democracy Defenders Fund. Reprieve. Human Rights Watch. Middle East Democracy Center. Subscribe to their newsletters. Support their lawsuits. Share their investigations. Sunlight is how you fight corruption. These organizations are holding the lamp.

Mark your calendar. The 2026 midterms are months out. Show up. Register and vote in every race. Primaries included. Local races included. Secretaries of state, attorneys general, state judges, school boards, all of them. Democracy dies when decent people skip elections. The Republic is saved by people who show up in off years.

The Receipts Are Public

Your country has been here before. The men who wrote our Constitution built the Emoluments Clause precisely because they knew kings and princes would try to buy American officials. They saw it happening in Europe. They saw it happening in their own colonies. They put a lock on the door.

Trump picked the lock. He bragged about picking the lock. His party stood aside.

I am going to leave you with one image. Jamal Khashoggi walked into a Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018, to pick up a routine marriage document. He was a Washington Post columnist, a United States resident, and a man who trusted the American government would stand up for him. He never walked out. His wife still has not recovered his body. The man who ordered the murder was hosted for a state dinner in your White House. A military flyover greeted the killer on the South Lawn.

The world watched. Every autocrat from Budapest to Beijing watched. They learned the price of an American president.

Now they are watching to see the price of silence from American citizens.

The receipts are public. The evidence is overwhelming. The lawsuits are piling up. The executive orders are on the record. The business deals are in the SEC filings. The Congressional resolutions are in the Congressional Record. The only question left is whether you show up and demand better, or whether you decide someone else should carry the weight of this moment.

There is no someone else.

There is only you, your voice, your vote, and your willingness to make noise while the making of noise is still protected.

Stand up.

Speak up.

Vote.

You owe it to Jamal Khashoggi. You owe it to Turki al Jasser. You owe it to every woman in Saudi Arabia and Qatar dreaming of equality. You owe it to every LGBTQ person living in fear there. You owe it to every migrant worker buried without a death certificate.

You owe it to your own children.

And you owe it to the country you thought you were raising them in.

Mitch Jackson, Esq.

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