Just before the start of the pandemic, I started looking for a longer project on the personalization of the global policy that was accelerated by but not launched by Trump. In a way, personalization is the inevitable companion of authoritarianism and autocracy. If there is a guy who directs the spectacle in each country, the affairs of this state become intrinsically indistinguishable from that of the autocrat and his personal checkbook. Relations between states become those of individual people.
At the start of Biden's presidency, I spoke to one of the very high -end hedge fellows who are in the class of people who are invited to dinners and Shindigs with Mohamad Bin Salman, the de facto sovereign of Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh. It was roughly when Jared Kushner obtained this huge investment of $ 2 billion in his new post-Blanc house fund. This source described one of these dinners that had occurred shortly before this investment. Kushner was sitting right to the right to the left or left of MBS. I don't remember what but the same difference. Given the quantity of power that MBS exercises and the almost unilateral control over hundreds of billions of dollars that people would probably kill literally for this level of preference and proximity. But as it was transmitted to me all this weekend or a series of days suggested that Jared was only MBS guy. As in he loved Jared. And remember, Trump was out of power. And at the beginning of 2022 or perhaps at the end of 2012, he was by no means an obvious bet that he would return to power. The relationship seemed to go far beyond a bet on the Trump family that comes to power.
