The most dangerous thing about Donald Trump is his attention span ...Middle East

Donald Trump likes shiny things. Sadly, they don’t retain his attention.

Readers may remember Trump’s last presidential visit to Saudi Arabia, during which he was entranced by a glowing orb constructed to mark the opening of Saudi’s Global Centre for Combating Extremist Ideology. (A centre to combat the kind of extremist ideology that defines atheism as “terrorism” and bans conversion away from Islam? No, that’s Saudi state policy.)

The abiding image of the 2017 jaunt captured Trump, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz placing their hands on the orb and allowing light to radiate through their fingers.

At the end of the trip, the Saudis presented the orb to the Americans as a gift. But Trump had lost interest in his new toy. The orb sat for a few days in a hallway of the US Embassy in Riyadh until, according to a 2020 book, it was hidden deep in embassy storage. Perhaps it lies there still.

Eight years later, Trump is back in Riyadh. In the interim, if this week’s headlines are anything to go by, the Arab states have absorbed two lessons about this US President – he likes lavish gifts and you need to seize his attention when you have it.

Trump is notorious for his lack of focus. Often, a flashy gift is a quicker way of getting the President to take notice than a policy document.

Foreign-policy insiders, even those who have trimmed their sails to the Trump wind, have long despaired of his childlike impatience with the serious work of foreign affairs. The shifting mood music on Ukraine is regularly punctuated by briefings from White House insiders admitting that they can’t predict how their boss will feel about Volodymyr Zelensky at any given hour. The American “peace” talks over Ukraine have the sense of a schoolchild’s unfinished homework project – painted in bright colours across half a poster, then abandoned as soon as something else turned up.

Behind these worries is the nagging concern about whether Trump can actually focus on his brief. The US President is traditionally expected to sit each morning for an intelligence presentation on global threats: a Politico report this week alleged that during Trump’s first 100 days, he has only manage to sit through this daily brief on 12 of those days – a problem worsened by the fact that he never reportedly reads “the book”, his hard-copy briefing.

This is not a revelation: a 2017 Washington Post report on Trump’s Afghanistan policy alleged that White House National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster was at his wits end with Trump’s refusal to read policy briefs of more than a few bullet points. “I call the president the two-minute man”, said one anonymous Trump advisor. “The president has patience for a half page.”

Leaks like this have previously seen the internet burst forth with amateur ADHD diagnoses, toddler-training tips and marketing plugs for information synthesis systems. (In response to the Washington Post report, the talk-show host Seth Meyers suggested briefing the President by Limerick.)

Yet there’s a simpler explanation for Trump’s refusal to sit down with his staff and listen. As one contact who spent years dealing with Trump in New York put it to me: “Trump has never believed he has anything to learn from the people who work for him.” This is a man who once referred to US military leaders as “my generals”. By the same parlance, White House aides are not servants of the people, but personal servants of the Trump family.

By contrast, the few men whom Trump recognises as peers are kings and dictators. Why talk Gaza with one’s staff, when one can talk man to man with the Saudis and feel like a king? This, as much as any relationship, could explain why Trump insists on private meetings with Vladimir Putin, mano-a-mano. (Don’t be surprised if he adds an unscheduled Turkey stop to his trip for another Putin meeting to carve up Ukraine.) And if your chums at the international top table gift you a sword and a few fur coats into the bargain – as the Saudis did in 2017 – so much the better. Even if, alas, the fur coats turned out to be fake.

The states on Trump’s tour of the Gulf have got the message. The new Syrian government, taking notes from Trump’s recent shakedown of Ukraine’s mineral assets, has offered America a similar package, and the President a pitch for Trump tower. The Saudis have rolled out a lavender carpet – nobody tell them about its historic associations with homosexuality in the West – but the most shameless generosity of the week came courtesy of the Qataris.

square BEN KENTISH

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This week, news broke of a proposed gift to Trump by the Qatari royal family: a luxury 747 private jet, described as a “palace in the sky”. It comes just as Qatar’s sovereign fund unveils a package of investments in Trump family businesses, including a Trump golf course backed by subsidiary Qatari Diar.

Trump isn’t even pretending that he’ll gift the plane to the nation, as is required for diplomatic gifts from foreign states: after his term of office ends, the plan is to keep it within a Trump entity, the Trump Presidential Library.

This is the new norm of American foreign policy: diplomacy as a squeeze for cash, where both the President’s family and his voters need to get their cut. The American Founding Fathers were clear-eyed about the need to prevent US officials from being influenced by foreign monarchies: the “Foreign Emoluments Clause” of the US constitution exists to do just that.

But if Donald Trump cared much about the Enlightenment values that underpinned the constitution, he probably wouldn’t be pals with Saudi Arabia. This is not a state that goes in for free speech of the First Amendment: it has just sentenced a British citizen to 10 years after a secret trial over a tweet.

The days when US foreign policy reflects its founding values are dead and buried. Long live the foreign policy of shiny gifts.

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