The night America’s doomed ruling class gorged on lamb, blood, and oil

Apparently, time really does heal all wounds — even those caused by the bone saw of a murderous prince and his personal goon squad after they hacked an intrepid Washington Post opinion journalist into pieces for speaking the truth about a corrupt and contented regime.

It’s hard to believe now, but there was actually a very brief time — in 2018, to be exact — when corporate America and even some political leaders pretended to have enough morals to resist this stone-cold killer with bags of money: Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS.

It wasn’t just Oval Office-bound candidate Joe Biden who’d promised (falsely) to make MBS “a global pariah” after the CIA stated the obvious: that the crown prince was behind the barbaric murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. Six years ago, some of the nation’s top business leaders — like the CEOs of J.P. Morgan Chase, Ford, and Uber, and Donald Trump’s billionaire pal, Stephen Schwarzman — abruptly ditched a high-profile Saudi investment forum, and a few businesses totally cut ties with the oil dictatorship.

In 2025, any pretense of “corporate social responsibility,” let alone shame, in America’s C-suites is as outdated as dial-up internet. Schwarzman — who canceled his 2019 flight to Riyadh but not his Blackstone Group’s lucrative ties to the Saudi wealth fund — toasted MBS at a White House dinner Tuesday night, as did Ford CEO William Clay Ford Jr.

But then it would probably take less time to list which high-profile captains of American industry didn’t show up to fete MBS on his first official visit to Washington since that brief unpleasantness of — in the infamous words of Monty Python — bickering and arguing over who killed whom.

The world’s sometimes richest human and Trump’s best frenemy Elon Musk, CEO of $5 trillion corporation Nvidia, Jensen Huang, GM head honcho Mary Barra, computer mogul Michael Dell, Big Oil titan Mike Wirth of Chevron, and many others all donned tuxedos or glitzy gowns to hoist a glass for the butcher of Istanbul and his host, the Unabomber of Caribbean fishing boats.

They gorged themselves on pistachio-crusted rack of lamb (a defenseless sacrificial sheep presumably also carved up with a bone saw), flecked with green nuts in some kind of communal transubstantiation with the blood-stained petrodollars they were really there to devour.

The ravenous CEOs included Tim Cook of Apple, apparently suffering from a bout of amnesia after his 2019 post-Khashoggi promise to look into Apple’s hosting of a Saudi app that allows men to track the movements of their wives and daughters (it’s still there), and apparently also unburdened, as the nation’s most prominent LGBTQ business leader, by the Saudis’ occasional executions of gay men.

The candlelight of the gilded East Room also revealed budding media mogul David Ellison, whose toasting of Khashoggi’s killer told us a lot more than any Beltway punditry about the moral fiber of the journalism that the Paramount Global boss plans for his new plaything, CBS News.

It felt more than fitting that the biggest buzz in a room larded with the billionaire men (and they were mostly men) — all so aggrieved by the short-lived #MeToo push — was for soccer superstar Cristiano Ronaldo, who during the 2017 peak of that movement fought off charges he sexually assaulted a woman in a Las Vegas hotel room. Ronaldo — who abandoned the hallowed pitches of European football to make billions on an obscure Saudi squad — was in many ways the essence of a room doing ethical backflips for the almighty petrodollar.

For one appalling night, the East Room became a capitalism megachurch where the donation plate was filled with the paper-thin pledge card of MBS’s vague promise to invest $1 trillion (we’ll see about that) on United States soil. But the Scriptures didn’t mention the record number of executions carried out by the Saudi regime, including the June death of journalist Turki al-Jasser, who tweeted criticism of his nation’s rulers and was reported to have been beheaded by a sword, MBS’s preferred method of (literally!) capital punishment.

The MBS banquet was such a depraved and decadent ritual that it wouldn’t have been surprising if the Fortune 500 executives had broken out in satanic chants as if they were characters in a wretched Dan Brown sequel to The Da Vinci Code.

This was an orgiastic celebration of death — not just the literal state murders of Khashoggi, al-Jasser, and other journalists and dissidents hacked to death so the Saudis can keep their fossil fuels flowing, but also the death of press freedom, the death of the make-believe era of “woke corporations,” the death of democracy, and — worst of all — the death of a planet.

» READ MORE: Oil is the poison that burns Paradise, kills Kashshoggi, inflames Paris. When will we quit? | Will Bunch

It didn’t seem an accident of timing that the American president and our elite ruling class was sharing their couverture mousse pear dessert with the world’s other top oil producer at the very moment the efforts of the global community — albeit without serious support from the United States, Saudi Arabia, or Trump’s other blood brother, Russia — to fight climate change were imploding at the failed COP30 summit in Brazil.

Even the amoral MBS and his Saudi regime — which is actually investing heavily in solar and other forms of clean energy — is taking the already-here crisis of global warming more seriously than Trump’s America, where his MAGA government is racing to cancel large-scale wind and solar projects and drill for oil off our endangered shores. This is what corporate America blessed when it broke bread at Trump’s White House.

In a New York Times essay, foreign policy expert Noah Shachtman wrote that “instead of trying to separate from the Persian Gulf petrostates, Mr. Trump is reshaping America to look more like them: top-down, iron-fisted, resource-rich and more than willing to flash those resources as weapons.” The leaders of Apple, Nvidia, GM, and Citibank have embraced this. This is what modern fascism looks like.

And yet, in bowing down to the petrostate mentality and all the grotesque corruption that comes with that, corporate America is also celebrating yet another kind of death: their own. The Saudi mindset, now fully embraced by the Trump regime and its billionaire obeyers, is a race to cash in — because oil, like life itself, is finite.

Tuesday’s pagan feast was ultimately a celebration of denial — denial that their guest of honor was a murderer, denial that the never-ending pasta bowl of petrodollars won’t last, denial that they’ve given up on saving the world from drought and floods and probably mass death. And denial that their 21st-century gilded age is about to crash down on them faster than the rubble of the East Wing outside their window.

Deep down in the queasy, lamb-fed pit of their stomachs, America’s CEOs know it. So does Trump. The most corrupt president in U.S. history and his family have fully embraced the grafty zeitgeist of the Saudi gold rush, from his son-in-law’s $2 billion investment windfall to a planned Trump Organization real estate development.

The art of the crooked deal was partly behind the president’s Oval Office crude dismissal of a reporter’s Khashoggi question. “Things happen,” he said, implying it was a shame what happened to the Post columnist who must have fallen off the back of a truck — an answer that reeked of organized crime boss bravado that was actually masking real fear.

Because Lordy, there are transcripts. Virginia U.S. Rep. Eugene Vindman, who was a White House aide at the time of Khashoggi’s 2018 murder, joined with the journalist’s widow to urge the release of the text from what the now-congressman called a “shocking and disturbing” phone call between the first-term Trump and MBS in the immediate aftermath.

Indeed, it seemed all too appropriate that the Oval Office questions for Trump and MBS blurred between those about the Khashoggi butchery and about the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking scandal, because in so many ways, they are the exact same story. It is the story of America’s rich and powerful and their narcissistic avatar at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. pursuing their innermost desires — whether that’s oil-tainted riches or 14-year-old girls — before the wrecking ball comes for them.

This wasn’t a state dinner, but it was a state funeral for a billionaire class whose gusher is rapidly running dry.

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