Trump, Ignoring Maga Critics, Is Set To Deepen Us Commitment To Saudi Arabia

President Donald Trump is making a high-profile overture to Saudi Arabia and its polarizing de facto leader — even as some major MAGA figures say the White House is too focused on foreign affairs at the expense of domestic issues.

When Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman arrives at the White House on Tuesday, it will mark the first such visit since he was implicated in the killing of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.

And he will be feted as one of the United States’s closest allies, expected to receive significant economic and national security wins.

Trump, who will also host Mohammed at a lavish dinner, is considering a bilateral security agreement pledging to defend Saudi Arabia in the event of any attack, according to a person familiar with the plans who was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. It would mark the second such NATO-style pact with a Gulf ally, coming on the heels of Trump’s executive order in September promising to defend Qatar.

Trump is deepening U.S. ties to Saudi Arabia even though the crown prince has rebuffed his number one priority: the kingdom normalizing relations with Israel, which was derailed by the war in Gaza. For now, the president can point to new investments the Saudis are expected to announce as the primary benefit from these discussions — which come on top of $600 billion in commitments made earlier this year. Trump also sees Saudi Arabia as a linchpin to his longer-term ambitions of forging both lasting peace and a growing prosperity that stands to benefit the wealthiest interests in the Middle East as well as his own.

The president, one senior White House official said, “has been clear” with the crown prince about the importance of Saudi Arabia eventually signing onto the Abraham Accords, his landmark first-term initiative aiming to bring stability to the region through countries normalizing ties with Israel.

“But he understands it’s not something they can do right now,” the official went on. “This is an important relationship in the region and there are real benefits for both sides.”

Trump’s affinity for Mohammed is genuine and the two speak by phone weekly, said the White House official and one of the people familiar with plans for the visit.

Saudi Arabia, which will host an investment conference at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, is also likely to reach an agreement to import U.S.-made artificial intelligence chips and possibly a signal of support for its nuclear power program, the two people said. And there are rumblings about an agreement to allow Saudi Arabia to purchase F-35s, America’s most advanced fighter jet. If the deal comes together, it could give Trump greater leverage to compel Riyadh toward normalization with Israel and away from its defense cooperation with China.

Saudi Defense Minister Prince Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince's younger brother, posted on Twitter Tuesday that he met with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff ahead of this week’s meeting.

As he did in his first term, Trump chose to make Riyadh the first major foreign trip of his term, a signal of America’s orientation away from alliances based on shared democratic values toward an unabashedly mercantilist brand of international deal-making that deems public and private interests one and the same. The president’s focus on the Gulf and interest in multilateralism, at least in that region, has borne fruit in securing the first phase of a fragile ceasefire between Israel and the Hamas militant group that still controls some of the Gaza Strip.

Trump has leaned heavily on Qatar to help orchestrate and implement the Gaza deal. And when Qatar demanded some kind of U.S. security guarantee following Israel’s Sept. 9 missile attack targeting Hamas officials who were in Doha for peace talks, Trump issued an executive order vowing to defend Qatar if it is attacked again. The new NATO-esque precedent Trump established in the Middle East raised eyebrows throughout the region.

“A lot of this visit right now is about trying to get exactly what the Qataris got, if not more,” said Jonathan Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst at the Treasury Dept. and now the executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a non-partisan Washington think tank.

“The Saudis and the Qataris are traditional rivals in the Gulf,” Schanzer continued. “I think the Saudis certainly are eyeing all of this with a bit of jealousy, and certainly, wanting to get as much as they can.”

The White House did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump still sees the Saudis as essential players in the region and the crown prince hopes to leverage that influence to secure a similar defense pact as Qatar. This one, however, Saudi leaders hope, would be signed by both leaders, as opposed to an executive order, even though anything not ratified by Congress can be undone by the next president.

As is the case with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, the other two stops on Trump’s first foreign trip, investments have been the backbone of the relationship with Saudi Arabia. On his May trip, Trump touted a $600 billion Saudi investment commitment following a conference attended by American business titans and some of the richest individuals in the kingdom.

Now, another investment conference is set to take place in Washington.

“It’s smart of them to bring along these Saudi investors,” said one Middle Eastern diplomat in Washington, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s exactly what Trump and his administration wants.”

But the desire for fresh capital isn’t Trump’s alone. The crown prince is also looking to attract investors in Saudi projects as he looks to share more of the financial burden with the private sector when it comes to modernizing the nation’s economy as it moves away from oil and into tech, real estate, health care and other industries.

Saudi Arabia’s high interest rates and uneven progress on massive infrastructure projects — including an ill-conceived linear city — have dented returns for the Public Investment Fund, its $1 trillion sovereign wealth vehicle. And lower oil prices have contributed to softer profits at Saudi Aramco, a state-owned oil business and major force in its domestic economy.

At an investment conference in Riyadh last month, Saudi officials underscored that the future of the country’s development will be increasingly reliant on private sources of capital. And they’ve aggressively courted U.S. firms in a bid for more foreign investment.

Trump’s appearances over two days with Mohammed, who is expected to encourage the president to apply his peacemaking efforts to reach a ceasefire in Sudan, are liable to further test the allegiance of some prominent MAGA supporters.

Following a resounding Democratic win in elections earlier this month, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Green (R-Ga.) and former senior White House adviser Steve Bannon have suggested that Trump turn his focus from international dealmaking to fulfilling the central promise of his political movement.

Greene, who has more pointedly questioned whether Trump’s second term approach is living up to his “America First” mantra, said in a post on X last week as Trump hosted Syria’s new leader at the White House that she “would really like to see nonstop meetings at the WH on domestic policy not foreign policy and foreign country’s leaders.”

Trump, however, defended his focus on foreign affairs and has shot back at Greene with increasing animosity in recent days.

Trump called Greene a “ranting lunatic” and said he was withdrawing his support for her in a social media post late Friday.