President Donald Trump sure picked a curious venue to start calling Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a "dictator."
It was February 19, halfway through a remarkable two-week run in which America reversed its approach to both the Russia-Ukraine war and possibly the entire 76-year-old Washington-led trans-Atlantic military alliance. Trump was speaking in Miami Beach's Faena Hotel and Forum at a bland-sounding "Priority Summit" hosted by the innocuously named Future Investment Initiative Institute, which in turn is owned by the nondescript Public Investment Fund (PIF). But to the global financial elite, that latter entity is far from obscure. At an estimated $941 billion, the PIF is the sixth-largest sovereign wealth fund on the planet, owned by one of the world's most authoritarian dictatorships, Saudi Arabia.
The institute's international confabs have not been without controversy. In October 2018, after the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi was strangled to death and then sawed into bits at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, reportedly at the behest of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, then-Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, with Trump's blessing, joined a host of American and international CEOs and VIPs in withdrawing from the institute's flagship annual investment conference in Riyadh, sometimes known as "Davos in the Desert." Wall Street had largely gotten over its spasm of conscience by 2021, however, and Trump—like so many POTUSes before him, especially in the Bush family—maintains a warm relationship with the House of Saud. So by February 2025, no one was making much hay about an American president hailing Saudi Arabia as "a special place with special leaders," answering a question about his three ideal dinner guests by naming two Saudi officials in the room (plus the also-present and notoriously corrupt Italian-Swiss head of the international soccer federation FIFA, Gianni Infantino), and singling out for gratitudinal praise the aforementioned Salman.
