US President Donald Trump has bragged to his supporters at a rally in in Green Bay, Wisconsin about a curious phone call with Saudi Arabian King Salman, which resulted in an agreement that the Persian Gulf monarchy would pay more money to the US in exchange for American military support.
Addressing a vast “Make America Great Again” gathering on Saturday, the POTUS mimicked the way the king spoke to him, stressing that he would prefer the Saudis to be Washington’s close partners because of Riyadh’s extensive military purchases from the US:
"They [Saudis] have nothing but cash, right?" he told the exuberant crowd. "They buy a lot from us, $450 billion they bought".
"We lose $4.5 billion on a country to defend them, and they're rich", Trump said.
"So I called them. I said: listen, no good. They were in a state of shock because they've never got a call like this in 25 years, right", he told [54:00] an exuberant audience.
"I said we're losing $4.5 billion every year, we can't do this anymore. This is crazy. He [Salman] got very upset, angry, said this is not fair. I said, of course, this is fair. He said we'll give you $500 million more… I said I want more. We argued.
So they paid us more than $500 million for one phone call, it took me one call", the American president boasted. Salman expressed a deep surprise over the unexpected conversation and the straightforward way Trump put the US’ demands, asking why Trump called him, thereby doing something nobody had done before:
"That's because they were stupid!" the American head of state replied with reference to his predecessors.
"You had people wanting to cut off Saudi Arabia… I don't want to lose them", Trump said, apparently referring to bipartisan calls in Washington to punish Riyadh over their alleged involvement in the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October.
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The rhetoric appears to have been largely unchanged since last year at least: in September 2018, Trump said he had told King Salman that Riyadh has "trillions of dollars" and could pay its military bills.
"I love Saudi Arabia. They are great, King Salman, I spoke with him this morning. I said, king, you have got trillions of dollars. Without us, who knows what’s going to happen….. With us they are totally safe. But we don’t get what we should be getting", he said, adding that there is no way the US would subsidise the military of “rich” Saudis.