Many others drew on tropes from science fiction and fantasy, invoking comic-book<br />villains, the Harry Potter novels and films, and even “The Wizard of Oz.”<br />Breitbart, the far-right news website that has been a champion of Mr. Trump’s campaign<br />and his presidency, took notice as well, juxtaposing an image of the leaders with a clip showing George Lucas, the “Star Wars” creator, saying, “I may have gone too far in a few places.”<br />Brian Klaas, a political scientist who has been critical of Mr. Trump, likened the<br />leaders to the evil wizard Saruman from J. R. R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”<br />The real meaning of the sphere had little to do with the occult.<br />President Trump, King Salman of Saudi Arabia and President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt entered a darkened<br />room filled with row after row of computers in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, on Sunday evening.<br />Bill Kristol, a prominent conservative critic of Mr. Trump, likened the group to the conclave of witches in “Macbeth.”<br />"Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and caldron bubble."<br />The occasion was the opening of a new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology, based in Riyadh,<br />and the orb was in fact a translucent globe, with the world’s waters represented in light gray and the continents in black.
