Jamal Khashoggi was a Saudi journalist, Washington Post commentator, prominent analyst we all spoke to regularly and (I use this descriptor carefully) a cautious dissenter.
It is no exaggeration to say that his murder had – at the time – a profound impact on the geopolitical tectonic plates of the world.
On 2 October 2018, he went to the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, and never came out again.
Even a Saudi official investigation concluded that he had been strangled, drugged, and his body dismembered and disposed of in an operation that was intended to bring him back to the kingdom by means of persuasion or, if that failed, by force.
As the grisly details of bone saws emerged, the impact of his murder swept around the globe.
Particularly when, a few years later in February 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States said that no rogue outfit had instigated this.
Instead, they accused Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself, the de facto ruler of the kingdom, of approving an operation “to capture or kill” him.
MBS, as he is known, and his government vehemently and repeatedly denied the allegations of his knowledge and involvement.
But it was too late. President Joe Biden said he wanted to make MBS and his administration a ‘pariah’ on the world stage.
On Tuesday came a very different reception from the Republican president.
On 18 November 2025, MBS is received in the White House as the guest of honour in his first visit there since Khashoggi’s murder.
Sitting by his side is US president Donald Trump, who is dressing down an ABC journalist who has dared to ask the Saudi ruler about the brutal murder of a fellow reporter that the CIA has directly linked to him.
“Fake news ABC – one of the worst in the business,” Trump says furiously, adding, “You do not have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
MBS was not only doing a “phenomenal job”, he adds, but he knew “nothing” about the killing.
Khashoggi, meanwhile, the US president concludes, was somebody “extremely controversial”.
“A lot of people did not like that gentleman [Khashoggi] that you are talking about. Whether you liked him or did not like him, things happen, but [MBS] knew nothing about it, and we can leave it at that.”
MBS, clearly uncomfortable, said it was “painful” and a “mistake” and claimed that Saudi Arabia had “improved our system to be sure that nothing happened like that”.
For Trump, contradicting your own country’s intelligence assessment, exonerating the accused perpetrator who is also a guest head of state, and writing off a brutal murder merely as “things happen”, all while besmirching the victim’s reputation, is extraordinary.
Especially as Trump was chastising the journalist who, at a press conference, was asking a comparatively basic question.
This is deeply concerning for all of us.
What kind of message does Trump’s casual disregard for it send to autocratic rulers around the world? What kind of message does it give to press freedoms globally, to freedom in general? What kind of message does it send to the US, at a time when it is struggling with freedoms itself?
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in its latest report that after a century of gradual expansion of press rights in the United States, the country is experiencing its “first significant and prolonged decline in press freedom in modern history” adding that “Trump’s return to the presidency is greatly exacerbating the situation.”
It attributed this to early moves in his second term of office, including banning the Associated Press from the White House.
The Committee to Protect Journalists, another global media watchdog, rang the alarm bells in a report released in April, concluding that a flurry of executive actions has created a “chilling effect and have the potential to curtail media freedoms”.
CPJ even noted a significant increase in the number of newsrooms “seeking safety advice”.
And this is just through the lens of the media. Respected institutions like the global watchdog the Varieties of Democracy project based in Stockholm, and the think tank Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, have all sounded the alarm more generally.
In August, Carnegie released a paper comparing the democratic backsliding in the United States to countries like Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey. It highlighted the Trump team’s efforts to secure “an extreme form of presidential concentration of power within the executive branch”, which is dominant over other parts of the government.
This also signals the clear direction of US foreign policy. I do not think anyone is under any illusion that the United States’ work abroad has ever been anchored in truly being a selfless beacon of democracy and freedom.
But usually there is a veneer. And that was well and truly stripped away in Tuesday’s display of fury against the media, Trump’s contradiction of his own intelligence service conclusions, and casual dismissal, nay, acceptance of a murder of a journalist.
Martin Luther King Jr’s “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” has been quoted ad nauseam precisely because it is so prescient and true.
And that is the warning that comes to mind now.
“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” he concluded in that letter from Birmingham jail. “Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
