President Trump announced in Saudi Arabia Tuesday that he has secured a $600-billion commitment from the Kingdom to invest in the United States, promising the deal will “strengthen our energy security, defense industry, technology leadership, and access to global infrastructure and critical minerals.”
According to the White House fact sheet, the new economic ties with the Saudis “will endure for generations to come” and “represent a new golden era of partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia.”
Trump participated in a signing ceremony on the exchange of agreements.
President Trump landed in Saudi Arabia Tuesday morning amid much pomp and circumstance after receiving a fighter jet escort through the kingdom’s airspace.
Six Saudi F-15s cruised “in close proximity” to Air Force One for the final half-hour of the flight, the New York Post reported.
“Thank you for the escort, and having President Trump’s back—We all appreciate it, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Dan Scavino, posted on X while still in the air. “See you on the ground shortly, THANK YOU!!!” he added.
Trump gave a fist-pump as he disembarked from the plane and was greeted on the tarmac by a smiling Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and his entourage.
Bin Salman escorted him down a lavender carpet to an indoor meeting space, where the country’s de facto ruler hosted a coffee ceremony.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick were among the US cabinet members joining Trump’s entourage.
The streets of the scorching Saudi capital were lined with US flags for the visit, and mobile billboards along the route this week have been advertising the just-announced Disney Abu Dhabi theme park in the nearby United Arab Emirates.
Political commentator Mark Halperin pointed out on the Morning Meeting that the visuals for Trump in Saudi Arabia were “remarkable”—especially in contrast to the Saudis’ treatment of Joe Biden, who was greeted at the airport by “low level officials” when he visited the Kingdom.
Biden had a notoriously cool relationship with the Saudis after he vowed during the 2020 presidential campaign to treat the kingdom as a “pariah” state because of its alleged involvement in Islamist journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s assassination in Istanbul, Turkey in 2018.
Joe Biden’s strained relationship with the Saudis became a problem for him in 2022 when he begged the Kingdom to increase oil production for the U.S. to bring down gas prices ahead of the midterm election.
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman declined White House requests to pump more oil. After Biden threatened Saudi Arabia on CNN, telling anchor Jake Tapper that the Kingdom would face “consequences” if it moved to cut oil production, the Kingdom released a statement accusing the Biden administration of pressuring them to delay cuts to oil production until after the election.
In October 2023, Bin Salmon made then-Secretary of State Blinken wait for several hours overnight before meeting with him, in what was seen as a sign of profound disrespect.
Later Tuesday, Trump delivered a speech to a U.S.-Saudi investor forum with Big Tech CEOs, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman.
President Trump took the stage at the forum as the MAGA anthem “God Bless the USA” was played.
The president said it was a “tremendous honor” to be invited back to Saudi Arabia, where his first foreign trip took place in 2017, and called bin Salman a personal friend.
“The U.S.-Saudi relationship has been a bedrock of security and prosperity,” Trump said. “Today, we reaffirmed this important bond, and we take the next steps to make our relationship closer, stronger and more powerful than ever before.”
Trump said Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh, “is becoming not just a seat of government, but a major business, cultural and high-tech capital of the entire world.”
“It’s crucial for the wider world to know this great transformation has not come from western intervention or flying people in beautiful planes giving you lectures on how to live and how to govern your own affairs, no,” he said.
“The gleaming marbles of Riyadh and Abu Dhabi were not created by the so-called nation builders, neocons or liberal nonprofits like those who spent trillions and trillions of dollars failing to develop Kabul, Baghdad, so many other cities,” he continued. “Instead, the birth of a modern Middle East has been brought by the people of the region themselves. … In the end, the so-called nation builders wrecked far more nations than they built, and the interventionalists were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.”
“In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins,” the president added.
President Trump’s three-nation tour of the Mideast also includes Qatar and the UAE, where he is expected to focus on additional investment deals for the US later this week.
The president was criticized by Democrats after he accepted the royal family of Qatar’s offer of a jumbo jet for his exclusive use as a presidential plane.
“So the fact that the Defense Department is getting a GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE, of a 747 aircraft to replace the 40 year old Air Force One, temporarily, in a very public and transparent transaction, so bothers the Crooked Democrats that they insist we pay, TOP DOLLAR, for the plane,” Trump posted on Truth Social Sunday evening. “Anybody can do that! The Dems are World Class Losers!!! MAGA.”
On Monday, Trump told reporters: “I could be a stupid person and say, oh no, we don’t want a free plane.”