Trump makes moves to return LIV — and 9/11 grief — to New Jersey | Mike Kelly

Donald Trump and the Saudis are coming back to New Jersey with their buckets of cash, their golf clubs and their murky morals.

Is the rest of America ready for this?

Does America even care?

To understand the bizarre nature of this reunion, let’s turn back the calendar to last summer.

In the midst of a brutal heat wave and wet-blanket humidity, our former president turned over his golf course in New Jersey’s horse country to a professional tournament financed by Saudi Arabia. The LIV golf tournament, backed with a reported $2 billion from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund and branding itself as an alternative to PGA events, promised to present “golf as you have never seen it.”

That was an understatement.

The tournament at the Trump Bedminster National Golf Club was no pitch-and-putt affair. But it was hardly the New Jersey equivalent of the Masters either.

With mega-speakers blaring rock music across the rolling 520 acres of Trump National and the former president donning his red, trademark “Make America Great Again” baseball cap, a squadron of professional golfers — many of them on the downside of their careers — hauled in piles of Saudi cash, some of it guaranteed for just showing up.

But what seemed most striking about this alleged sports event was not the quality of golf, which was ordinary at best; it was the omnipresent spate of questions about why any golfer would accept money from a Middle East nation that treats its people like serfs from the Middle Ages. In fact, why would any former president take this kind of money?

From public beheadings and crackdowns on women who merely want to let their hair down and get behind the wheel of a car to disturbing U.S. intelligence findings that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman OK'd the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia continues to be one of the world’s most nettlesome moral question marks.

Equally problematic here in America is the staggering amount of new evidence from recently declassified FBI investigative reports that point to at least a dozen Saudi officials — including one member of the Saudi royal family — who were linked to the Islamist militants who carried out the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Some Saudi officials met with 9/11 operatives before the attacks, possibly helping them financially and offering advice on how to find apartments in Muslim communities in Southern California or in East Coast cities like Paterson, New Jersey.

In politics, this information is the equivalent of a quadruple bogey — an embarrassment to avoid. Experienced politicians run from this kind of alliance.

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Why did Trump embrace LIV?

Which brings us to Trump.

Why did he get involved in the LIV tour? Some critics have called the development of the new golf tour “sport washing” — meaning that the Saudis used cold hard cash and a sports event in an attempt to wipe away all those nasty questions about “Game of Thrones”-style public executions, creepy murders of nettlesome journalists and their all-too-close relationship with the sicko killers who carried out the deadliest terror attack ever on American soil.

As a former president, you would think Trump might tap his greedy brakes before jumping into a deal with Saudi Arabia. But then, is anyone really shocked when Trump embraces a questionable business deal?

Asked last October about his ties to a regime with such a well-documented tawdry human rights record, Trump called the Saudis “good people with unlimited money.”

Trump then added this coda: “We have human rights issues in this country, too. We have human rights issues here as much as anybody.”

Really?

America isn’t perfect. But I’m at a loss to remember the last time our government beheaded someone in a town square.

No matter to Trump. He is a master of using moral equivalency and the “what about that?” style of rhetoric to muddy up the kinds of issues that ought to be clear-cut. His supporters have also taken up the “what about that?” mantra as if it is a new MAGA slogan. This summer, as criticism mounts over Trump's coziness with the Saudis, you can expect MAGA nation to ask, "What about Hunter Biden and the Ukraine?"

But facts are facts. And it’s a fact that our former president who has already declared himself a candidate in the 2024 presidential race is now a business partner with Saudi Arabia. Soon after leaving office, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who is not exactly known as a Wall Street wizard, was staked to a $2 billion investment from the same Saudi cookie jar that is financing the LIV tour.  How convenient.

Last year, Trump hosted one leg of the Saudi LIV golf tour in Bedminster, then another LIV event at his course in Miami. He never disclosed what he was paid. But if golfers like Phil Mickelson received a reported $200 million from the Saudis just for promising to play on the LIV tour, you can bet Trump’s financially flagging golf empire brought in some much-needed cash.

And now, Trump, after last summer’s cash bonanza, has agreed to host a third LIV Saudi-financed tournament — this time in Northern Virginia.

Less than 50 miles from Ground Zero

If nothing else, the geographic links to Trump's golf courses and the 9/11 attacks ought to raise questions.

Trump’s Bedminster course is less than 50 miles from lower Manhattan and the World Trade Center’s twin towers, which were struck on Sept. 11, 2001 by two commercial jetliners that had been hijacked by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda suicide killers. Trump’s National Golf Club Washington, D.C., which is really located in Potomac Falls, Virginia., is less than 30 miles from the Pentagon, which was also struck by a hijacked jetliner on 9/11.

Trump doesn’t seem to care about the disquieting proximity of holding a Saudi-backed golf tournament to terrorist attacks that the FBI says were supported in some way by Saudi officials. Asked last July at his Bedminster club about the allegations of Saudi-9/11 connections, Trump trotted out the kind of murky answer that is par for the course when he can’t explain himself.

“Well, nobody has gotten to the bottom of 9/11, unfortunately. And they should have, as to the maniacs who did that horrible thing to our city, to our country, to the world,” Trump told a group of journalists. “So nobody’s really been there.”

Huh? In 2016, as he was running for president, Trump publicly blamed the Saudis.

"Who blew up the World Trade Center? It wasn't the Iraqis, it was Saudi — take a look at Saudi Arabia, open the documents," Trump told Fox News in February 2016.

But Trump was not finished last summer when he suddenly developed amnesia about 9/11, the Saudis and his own beliefs about who was responsible. Perhaps sensing that he had just created a new low standard in gobbledygook, Trump changed subjects.

“But I can tell you that there are a lot of really great people out here today, and we’re going to have a lot of fun,” he said, as he looked around his golf course. “And we’re going to celebrate.”

Well, let's all get out the pompoms and shout hooray.

Trump's bizarre comments came only a few hours after dozens of people who lost relatives in the 9/11 attacks gathered on a field not far from Trump’s Bedminster golf course and asked how a man who occupied the White House and took an oath to defend the Constitution could ever become a business partner with foreign leaders suspected of participating in the 9/11 attacks.

“The 9/11 mass murder of our spouses, parents, children, and siblings left us with a lifetime of grief and pain,” the 9/11 relatives wrote in a letter to Trump. “That pain fuels our ongoing fight to hold Saudi Arabia accountable for its role in the attacks and what they have taken from each of us. It is incomprehensible to us, Mr. Trump, that a former president of the United States would cast our loved ones aside for personal financial gain.”

Incomprehensible?

Here, in New Jersey, we know Trump well. He wants the world to think he would “Make America Great Again.”  But the man’s real mantra is something else.

Money talks.

Mike Kelly is an award-winning columnist for NorthJersey.com as well as the author of three critically acclaimed non-fiction books and a podcast and documentary film producer. To get unlimited access to his insightful thoughts on how we live life in New Jersey, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: kellym@northjersey.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Donald Trump LIV Golf Saudi Arabia 9/11 links