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Donald Trump, in recent news, has downplayed the guilt of Saudi Arabia in the murder (in the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul, Turkey) of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who worked for the Washington Post. He says that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has assured him that he did not order the murder of Khashoggi. Trump says he believes the Crown Prince.

This is very reminiscent of when Trump met with Russian President Vladimir Putin and said that he believed Putin when Putin denied that Russian hackers had interfered in the US elections in 2016.

It looks as though Trump cannot conceive that anyone could or would lie to him. This from a man who is one of the most colossal liars of our time.

In both cases Trump has appeared to scorn his (or our, the US's) intelligence community, and what they were telling him, for the sake of cozying up to the leader of a foreign country (in the case of Saudi Arabia, they are somewhat more clearly our ally than would be the case with Russia).

I have to think that Trump was motivated by a desire to not alienate Putin, or Saudi Arabia. (One might say in the Saudi case that this was motivated by the US dependency on Saudi oil, but the truth is that currently the US is an exporter of energy so we are not as dependent on Saudi oil as was once the case. The US does sell Saudi Arabia a lot of arms and weapons, and maybe that is the motivation for trying, as Trump is apparently doing, to avoid any friction by saying that we believe what they tell us and don't believe they did something despicable--which earlier he seemed on the verge of doing.)

In other news, Trump has criticized a US district court for not ruling as Mr. Trump would have liked (the case, I believe, involved an asylum-seeker who had crossed our border). Trump complained about "Obama judges" who are not, in Trump's view, sufficiently concerned with the "safety" of our country and who are not taking a very hard line with asylum applications. He was rebuked by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, who said "There are no Obama judges, nor Trump judges, nor Bush judges. . . " and that we should be thankful that we have an independent judiciary.

Trump never takes disagreement or criticism lightly, so he struck back at Chief Justice Roberts. All this, I think, played out on Twitter, a platform clearly beloved by Trump.

I imagine that Trump's handlers have had to remind him (or, more likely, to try unsuccessfully to convince him) that he is not a king and must abide by the laws and the constitutional limits on his power and authority.

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