Describing how the French financial aristocracy accumulated wealth under the July Monarchy following the defeat of the 1830 revolution, Karl Marx wrote in The Class Struggles in France of “the top of bourgeois society …where money, blood, and filth commingle.” This description comes to mind when considering Tuesday’s obscene spectacle of US President Donald Trump, with the leading lights of America’s financial oligarchy in tow, paying homage at the court of Saudi despot and butcher Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman.
Mohammed Bin Salman presides over the affairs of a semi-feudal theocracy that still uses the sword to behead death penalty victims—of which 338 were recorded in 2024. The country’s authorities engage in rampant abuses against people detained for political activity, including long periods of detention without charge or trial, the use of evidence extracted by torture, the denial of legal assistance, and the violation of the rights to due process and a fair trial.
Bin Salman will forever remain notorious for ordering the 2018 killing of dissident Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s consulate in Istanbul. Thugs under Bin Salman’s orders chopped up the former Washington Post columnist’s body with a saw to remove any trace of the grisly state murder.
Trump and the billionaires allied with his administration, such as the world’s richest man Elon Musk, Open AI chief executive Sam Altman, and advanced chip maker Nvidea’s CEO Jensen Huang, attended first and foremost to make money for themselves and their business operations. As the New York Times reported, participants included executives “from tech firms, banks, consumer groups and other industries, including representatives of four of the 10 biggest U.S. companies by market value.”
Trump touted a Saudi promise to invest $600 billion into the US over the next four years—a figure that many economic experts believe is highly dubious due to Riyadh’s tight budgetary position produced by sustained low oil prices—and the sale of military equipment costing $142 billion to Riyadh. Bin Salman will undoubtedly deploy the fighter jets, missiles and other offensive weaponry supplied by Washington to suppress popular opposition to his despotic regime and wage war against its regional rivals.
Beyond the business transactions, there can be little doubt that Trump and the other American oligarchs saw in their Saudi hosts kindred spirits. They aspire to establish a dictatorship in the US to rival Bin Salman’s in lawlessness and brutality, as shown by Trump’s actions since his return to the White House and the support they enjoy in ruling circles.
Trump has mused about abrogating the US Constitution, ruled almost exclusively by executive order, deported immigrants to concentration camps and ordered the seizure of students for protesting the Gaza genocide. He has encouraged Israel to make its “concluding moves,” as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put it, in the genocide of the Palestinians in Gaza, and spent over $1 billion in a relentless bombardment of Yemen—the same impoverished country devastated during six years of Saudi air strikes beginning in 2015.
The modern-day American financial aristocracy wants a dictatorship—a government by, for, and of the oligarchy—so it can plunder society’s wealth by stepping up the exploitation of the working class, and seizing the resources of other countries through economic pressure and imperialist war.
While this development assumes its sharpest expression in the US, it is the essential response of the ruling class in all of the imperialist centres to the intractable crisis of global capitalism that is pitting the major powers against each other in a new redivision of the world, and exacerbating already horrendous levels of social inequality. A significant part of the explanation for the broad support within the oligarchy for Trump’s effort to establish a fascist dictatorship is the vast gulf between rich and poor, with the richest three Americans now owning more wealth than the poorest half of the population.
All of the oligarchy’s worst attributes—its lust for profit, self-promotion, lying and cheating, disregard of all legal restraints, and inestimable personal corruption—are concentrated in Trump. The US president’s four-day trip to the Middle East is acknowledged even by major bourgeois publications to consist to a great extent of opportunities for Trump and his family to enrich themselves through financial speculation and outright swindling. Investments in golf courses, hotels, other property developments and Trump’s digital coin will be topics for discussion as he moves on from Saudi Arabia later today to Qatar and to the United Arab Emirates tomorrow.
To top it all off, Trump will receive the “gift” of a luxury Boeing 747-8 jet worth an estimated $450 million from the Qatari royal family that will be converted for use as Air Force One for the duration of Trump’s presidency. After he leaves office, the plane will be donated to his presidential library.
CNN was obliged to note:
Donald Trump is traveling to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates this week not only as US president, but also as the patriarch of a family whose business empire continues to expand in that part of the world.
Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, under Bin Salman’s control, has invested $2 billion in a private equity firm launched by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, who served as Trump’s adviser during his first term and continues to advise him informally today. A project in Qatar to build a Trump-branded golf course is being funded by the Qatari sovereign wealth fund.
And in neighbouring Oman, the government-owned tourism agency partnered with the Trump Organization last year to build a holiday resort, complete with a golf course and villas. Eric and Donald Jr., Trump’s sons, dined with Oman’s Crown Prince last summer to celebrate the deal.
The Sultanate is currently acting as a go-between in talks between the US and Iran, which have been characterised by a resumption of Trump’s “maximum pressure” on the bourgeois-clerical regime in Tehran to compel it to abandon its nuclear programme and accept a Middle East dominated by Washington.
During their trip, Trump and his entourage will combine private business deals for the president’s mafia-like “Organization” with talks to advance American imperialism’s relentless drive to consolidate its unchallenged hegemony over the oil-rich and geostrategically critical Middle East. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar, which is home to the largest US military base in the region with some 10,000 soldiers, are viewed in Washington as key regional allies in the establishment of a “new Middle East.” Washington intends to base this on the elimination of the Palestinians by the Zionist regime, regime change in Tehran, and reversing the growing economic and diplomatic influence of China.
Marx observed that after years of “the shameless orgies of the finance aristocracy,” who got rich “not by production, but by pocketing the already available wealth of others,” the cry of the French people in the revolutionary year of 1848 was, “Down with the big thieves! Down with the big assassins!”
In 2025, a revolutionary movement on a far greater scale is brewing against the Trump administration and the financial oligarchy that backs it.
The criminal self-enrichment of the ruling elite, which is inseparable from its mad drive to capture markets, raw materials, and labour through economic plunder and imperialist war, creates the conditions for the eruption of a mass movement of the American and international working class. Its principal tasks will be to expropriate the oligarchy, put an end to imperialist war, and redistribute society’s vast financial and material resources through the fight for socialism.