Trump pulling out all the stops to welcome Saudi crown prince for first White House visit since Khashoggi killing

By Kevin Liptak, Kristen Holmes, Alayna Treene, CNN

(CNN) — President Donald Trump is planning to receive Saudi Arabia’s powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House this week with all the trappings of a state visit, sources familiar with the matter said, including a welcome ceremony in the morning and a formal dinner in the evening.

“We’re more than meeting,” Trump said late Friday as he flew to Florida for the weekend. “We’re honoring Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince.”

While the White House has decided to pull out all the stops, the visit cannot be classified as an official state visit as Prince bin Salman is not Saudi Arabia’s head of state. That position is occupied by his 89-year-old father, King Salman. But the crown prince has assumed almost all day-to-day responsibility for ruling the kingdom, and attends summits and other diplomatic engagements as the country’s leader.

The meetings Tuesday will mark Prince bin Salman’s first visit to the White House in more than seven years. Trump has worked to cultivate a close relationship with the kingdom’s de facto ruler in the hopes he will decide to establish diplomatic ties with Israel, which would be a major advancement of the president’s signature Abraham Accords — a longtime goal of the president’s.

“The Abraham Accords will be a part we’re going to be discussing,” Trump said Friday. “I hope that Saudi Arabia will be going into the Abraham Accords fairly shortly.”

The prince last visited Washington in 2018, months before the murder of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi at a Saudi consulate in Turkey. A CIA assessment released afterward found the prince had likely ordered the assassination, though he has long denied any involvement.

Trump never entirely cut off ties with the crown prince during his first term, though he wasn’t invited back to the White House. Even Trump’s successor President Joe Biden, who vowed as a candidate to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah” for its human rights record, visited Riyadh while in office and fist bumped Prince bin Salman.

With Tuesday’s visit, any semblance of a rupture in US-Saudi ties appears to have disappeared. The plans include a welcome ceremony involving military bands, a bilateral meeting in the Oval Office and a black-tie dinner in the evening.

The first tranche of invitations has been sent out and the guest list includes largely chief executives, as well as lawmakers and governors — some of whom Trump himself called to invite to the dinner, people familiar with the plans said. The event will be coordinated by first lady Melania Trump, as all state visits are planned through the first lady’s office.

Trump has yet to hold a state visit in his second term, which is typically put on as a sign of friendship and to display the close relationship the US shares with its allies, during his second term. Trump broke with tradition during his first administration by opting not to hold a state dinner during his first year in office, though he went on to host the president of France and prime minister of Australia in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

“President Trump looks forward to welcoming Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud to the White House, where the two leaders will participate in an official working visit,” a White House official said in a statement to CNN. “We will not get ahead of the President on conversations that are occurring ahead of time.”

Saudi Arabia is also planning an investment summit to coincide with the crown prince’s trip to Washington. The event at the Kennedy Center, a day after the White House visit, is intended to link up American and Saudi business leaders for financial opportunities.

In May, Trump visited Saudi Arabia for the first state visit of his second term and was welcomed with elaborate pageantry, including a fighter jet escort, an honor guard with golden swords and a fleet of Arabian horses accompanying his limousine. The president has sought to deepen ties to other Gulf states during his tenure, including Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

Before the May stop, Saudi Arabia promised to invest $600 billion in the United States. Trump brought several American executives with him to Riyadh, and signed several agreements. Many have yet to be fully implemented.

Ahead of Tuesday’s meetings, US and Saudi officials were working to finalize agreements on defense and security cooperation, including major new purchases of American-made fighter jets and weapons, a US official said.

Saudi Defense Minister Khalid bin Salman, who is the younger brother of the crown prince, was in Washington a week ahead of the visit for meetings with top Trump administration officials, including Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Peter Hegseth.

“We explored ways to bolster our strategic cooperation. We also addressed regional and international developments,” Khalid bin Salman wrote afterward.

Atop Trump’s agenda will be a discussion of Saudi Arabia normalizing relations with Israel, a step he believes is within reach after he helped broker a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.

The October 7, 2023, terror attack in Israel, and the war that followed, largely put on hold the normalization discussions that began during Trump’s first term and advanced during Biden’s. A framework being discussed before the attacks would include a US defense treaty with Saudi Arabia and help building a civilian nuclear program in exchange for establishing diplomatic relations with Israel.

Biden and many of his top aides have said they believe the October 7 attack was intended, in part, to obstruct the normalization talks. Now that a ceasefire is in place, Trump believes a deal can be quickly reached.

“I hope to see Saudi Arabia go in, and I hope to see others go in,” Trump told Fox News last month. “I think they’re going to all go in very soon.”

Still, some hurdles remain in getting the crown prince on board. While he and Trump are expected to sign a defense cooperation agreement Tuesday, it falls short of the treaty under discussion in earlier phases of normalization discussions, the US official said. A formal treaty would require congressional approval.

Saudi Arabia has also said a condition to normalizing ties with Israel is a “credible” and “irreversible” pathway to Palestinian statehood, which the Gaza plan Trump helped broker stops short of providing.

American officials were nonetheless hopeful about making progress on the issue during Tuesday’s meeting.

One of the architects of the Abraham Accords, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, visited Riyadh last week for talks with the crown prince ahead of Tuesday’s meeting, a White House official and a person familiar with the matter said. Kushner has long had a close, personal relationship with the Saudi prince, and has been deployed several times in recent months to use his ties to Mideast leaders to help lay the groundwork for Trump’s agenda and build upon the Abraham Accords.

Adding to the sensitive dynamic of the visit are Trump’s personal financial interests in the region. The Trump Organization, which is being run by the president’s sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, is involved in major real estate projects in Saudi Arabia. Kushner also has significant business ties to the country. Kushner’s investment fund, Affinity Partners, has raised billions of dollars in capital from Saudi Arabia.

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