With Harleys and Hamburgers, Saudis Salute U.S. on Trump’s Visit<br />Ahmad Aldubaikhi said that I love him because he’s honest,<br />Saudi Arabia has institutions and a parliamentary body<br />that are supposed to represent the people, he said, "but at the end of the day, the king says what goes." He added: "This is why some of the Americans are against him: ‘He did this, he fired the head of the F.B.I.’ But this is how we do it here." Other Arabs have called the optimism of Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies toward Mr. Trump naïve.<br />Mr. Aldubaikhi studied English in California before earning a degree in economics from the<br />University of Miami, where, he said, many Americans knew little about Saudi Arabia.<br />This man is seen in the United States as a joke, as racist, a man who has nothing, no view, no vision, no values," Fawaz A. Gerges,<br />a professor of international relations at the London School of Economics, said on an Arabic talk show before the visit.<br />Hundreds of thousands of Saudis have studied in the United States,<br />and many others have interacted with Americans through military ties or the oil industry, leaving traces of the United States across the kingdom.<br />Many Saudis said they admired Mr. Trump, offering a variety of reasons.<br />The basket of Donald Trump is full of holes." But any public criticism is unlikely to be heard during Mr. Trump’s time in Saudi Arabia, not least<br />because the government has invested so heavily in portraying the visit as the dawn of a new era.
