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So … how did that trip to Saudi Arabia go for Joe Biden? When you return and your first argument is that your hosts lied, it’s a sure sign of a flop.

We’re getting ahead of ourselves, however. When Biden first returned to the US, reporters wanted to know whether Biden might have sent the wrong signal by fist-bumping the man Biden personally fingered as the mastermind of an assassination plot against Jamal Khashoggi. Two years ago, Biden seemed delighted to talk about how he would shun the Saudis and turn them into a “pariah state” over the murder.

This morning, Biden didn’t want to discuss it at all:

It’s yet another case of shut up, he explained, although to be fair it’s tough to explain the inexplicable. Meeting with Mohammed bin Salman was unavoidable, especially given Biden’s idiotic energy policies, but the war in Ukraine would have required some coordination with Riyadh anyway. Reorienting American policy back to Trump’s Israeli-Sunni alliance made more sense than Biden’s insane attempt to orient the US toward Shi’ite Iran and/or walk away from the region through the Iran deal. Like it or not, the Saudis are a necessary strategic partner in the Middle East, a fact that Biden apparently only recently recognized despite his supposed foreign-policy expertise.

The meeting was explicable, and in fact a good sign that Biden has pulled his head out of his nether regions on American policy in the Middle East. The frat-boy, affectionate fist-bump greeting is entirely inexplicable given Biden’s previous accusations against MBS specifically and the regime more generally. It made Biden look like a supplicant, or at the very least as an endorsement of MBS as an equal on the world stage.

The only way for Biden to save face after that fiasco is to claim that he challenged MBS on the Khashoggi murder. Others in the room claimed, as John wrote last night, that the topic only came up perfunctorily and that Biden didn’t press the issue at all. One Saudi minister claimed that Biden never mentioned any indication that MBS was involved in the plot and that he accepted the crown prince’s commitment to human rights. When reporters challenged Biden’s version on his arrival, the Daily Mail reports that Biden accused the Saudis of lying about it:

President Joe Biden has accused a Saudi official of lying about the topics discussed in his private meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, while again downplaying his infamous fist bump with the prince.

Early on Sunday, Biden arrived back at the White House from his four-day Middle East tour, and briefly took questions from reporters gathered on the South Lawn.

Hours earlier, just after Air Force One had taken off from Jeddah, Saudi Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Adel al-Jubeir called a Fox News reporter and claimed that he ‘did not hear’ Biden confront bin Salman, known as MBS, over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Al-Jubeir’s claim seems to directly contradict Biden’s account of the meeting with MBS on Friday, after which the president said that he had raised Khashoggi’s murder ‘at the top of the meeting’ and accused the crown prince of directing the plot.

On the South Lawn, when asked if al-Jubeir was telling the truth about the meeting, Biden bluntly replied ‘No’.

Who’s telling the truth? In closed-room situations like this, we’d normally look to previous actions and established character to calculate credibility. Unfortunately, in this case neither side has much at all. The Saudis have been lying about the government’s involvement in the Khashoggi hit since it happened, and Biden’s been lying his entire political career — especially when it comes to creating a heroic narrative for himself. Not only has Biden constantly lied about his background and personal history, he’s plagiarized it from Neil Kinnock at one time. After the fury over the fist bump, does anyone doubt that Biden knew he needed to concoct a narrative that showed him as a tough guy with MBS … even while begging for oil?

The best we can do is guess, and my guess is that Biden mentioned something about Khashoggi but didn’t press MBS on it. That was, after all, an initial convergence of quasi-official descriptions of the exchange, with MBS using the jab to jab back at Biden over Abu Ghraib and the recent death of a Palestinian-American journalist in the West Bank in a conflict with the Israeli Defense Force.

But as a time-tested axiom in politics instructs: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. The fact that Biden has to explain at all shows that this trip was a loser, and that all Biden accomplished was to show how far out of his league he was.

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