"September 27th is the most important day in the Middle East since the Abraham Accords breakthrough."

"I have spent countless hours studying Hezbollah and there is not an expert on earth who thought that what Israel has done to decapitate and degrade them was possible. This is significant because Iran is now fully exposed. The reason why their nuclear facilities have not been destroyed, despite weak air defense systems, is because Hezbollah has been a loaded gun pointed at Israel. Iran spent the last forty years building this capability as its deterrent...."

Writes Jared Kushner, on X.

Trump's convention speech had 2 phases, both brilliant, but very different.

In the first phase, Trump describes the assassination attempt from his perspective and for what he asserts is the last time:

So many people have asked me what happened. “Tell us what happened, please.” And therefore, I will tell you exactly what happened, and you’ll never hear it from me a second time, because it’s actually too painful to tell. It was a warm, beautiful day in the early evening....

This fills 20 minutes and segues into an unrushed tribute to the man who died and the 2 other men who were injured. There's an iconic stage prop, Corey Comperatore represented in the form of his empty helmet and jacket. Trump kisses Comperatore's head and pats him on the shoulder then returns to the lectern to lead a silent prayer. Again unrushed (but not overlong). We see different members of the audience in different attitudes of prayer. (Jared Kushner, eyes wide open, looked straight ahead.) 

The first phase continued with the uplifting abstract material that Trump had promised to deliver. I've copied this section in full:

Matt Bai knows he "should care more about Hunter Biden," but he just doesn't.

And he's telling you why in The Washington Post:

... I find it hard to get too worked up over all this, the way I did over the egregious conflicts of Donald Trump’s family during the last administration.

At least he's noticing it and admitting it publicly and feels the need to explain it (or sees some advantage in purporting to need to explain it). Whether the reasons given are sincere, we can judge for ourselves: 

"It is unclear how meaningful stepping down as chief executive would be. The billionaire owns Twitter... and will remain its proprietor."

"On Sunday, he tweeted that he had no successor and suggested that there were no qualified candidates to lead Twitter. 'No one who wants the job can actually keep Twitter alive,' he posted. As soon as Mr. Musk took ownership of Twitter on Oct. 27, he fired its top executives. Other senior leaders have since been fired or resigned, leaving the executive suite vacant.... [Musk] has borrowed employees from his other companies, including Tesla and the Boring Company, a tunneling start-up, to join him.... Mr. Musk has also relied on Tesla and SpaceX employees to deal with technical matters, as layoffs and resignations have decimated Twitter’s engineering ranks.... Mr. Musk, who was in Qatar for the World Cup final this weekend with Jared Kushner, is also seeking new investment in Twitter.... On Friday night, the company began another round of layoffs.... Twitter, which had about 7,500 employees when Mr. Musk took over, has lost roughly 70 percent through layoffs, firings and resignations. The Information earlier reported the most recent round of cuts."

From "Elon Musk Says He Will Resign as Twitter C.E.O./When He Finds Successor Mr. Musk, who asked his Twitter followers on Sunday if he should step down as head of the service, will remain the company’s owner" (NYT).

Ann Coulter is trending on Twitter because of this tweet of hers.

To Trump:
You had your chance, with a Republican House and Senate. You handed domestic policy to your son-in-law and Gary Cohn. You handed foreign policy to your son-in-law and a country that gave your son-in-law $2 billion.

Shut the fuck up, forever.

— Ann Coulter (@AnnCoulter) November 11, 2022

"Can you imagine Jared and his skinny ass camping? It’d be like something out of 'Deliverance.'"

Said Donald Trump, who proceeded to imitate the "Deliverance" the banjo music, quoted in "Donald Trump Belittled Jared Kushner In Front Of Aides With ‘Deliverance' Jibe: Book/It was one of a series of disparaging comments the then-president made about his son-in-law, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman" (HuffPo). 

The topic was a proposed RV camping trip for Jared and Ivanka, and we're told that Jared was in the room. I can't tell how "belittling" the remark was without understanding the larger context. Did Jared mock Trump too? What's their relationship? Did both men laugh about remarks about skinniness and fatness? Was Trump also self-deprecating, saying, perhaps, he'd never go camping — and he's afraid of rapists?

Who knows? The remark belongs somewhere on a continuum between just plain nasty and the funniest thing ever, or I guess that's more of a matrix than a continuum.

Anyway, Haberman was choosing how to present the nuggets she gathered, and I wouldn't trust her to recreate the real feelings of the human beings involved. 

And this anecdote does present the old problem of not taking the rape seriously when the victim is male.

"'Breaking History' is an earnest and soulless — Kushner looks like a mannequin, and he writes like one — and peculiarly selective appraisal..."

"... of Donald J. Trump’s term in office. Kushner almost entirely ignores the chaos, the alienation of allies, the breaking of laws and norms, the flirtations with dictators, the comprehensive loss of America’s moral leadership, and so on, ad infinitum, to speak about his boyish tinkering... with issues he was interested in. This book is like a tour of a once majestic 18th-century wooden house, now burned to its foundations, that focuses solely on, and rejoices in, what’s left amid the ashes: the two singed bathtubs, the gravel driveway and the mailbox. Kushner’s fealty to Trump remains absolute. Reading this book reminded me of watching a cat lick a dog’s eye goo."

Meow! It's Dwight Garner, in "Jared Kushner’s ‘Breaking History’ Is a Soulless and Very Selective Memoir/In this lengthy book, Kushner recounts the time he spent in the White House during his father-in-law’s term" (NYT).

"The tone is college admissions essay. Typical sentence: 'In an environment of maximum pressure, I learned to ignore the noise and distractions and instead to push for results that would improve lives.' ... You finish 'Breaking History' wondering: Who is this book for? There’s not enough red meat for the MAGA crowd, and Kushner has never appealed to them anyway. Political wonks will be interested — maybe, to a limited degree — but this material is more thoroughly and reliably covered elsewhere. He’s a pair of dimples without a demographic."

"This was a personal problem and not for public consumption. With the exception of Ivanka, Avi, Cassidy and Mulvaney, I didn’t tell anyone at the White House — including the president."

Writes Jared Kushner, quoted in "Kushner Says He Was Treated for Thyroid Cancer While in White House/In a memoir to be published next month, former President Donald Trump’s son-in-law wrote that he wanted the diagnosis and treatment kept quiet" (NYT).

“The day before the surgery, Trump called me into the Oval Office and motioned for his team to close the door. ‘Are you nervous about the surgery?’ he asked,” Mr. Kushner wrote. 

“How do you know about it?” Mr. Kushner responded. 

“I’m the president,” Mr. Trump replied, according to Mr. Kushner. “I know everything. I understand that you want to keep these things quiet. I like to keep things like this to myself as well. You’ll be just fine. Don’t worry about anything with work. We have everything covered here.”

I’m the president... I know everything. 

What if there were a color that could drive (some) people mad?

Nope. pic.twitter.com/BgtT2wvFx1

— Kathy Griffin (@kathygriffin) July 12, 2021

It's some kind of litmus test, so take the test: 

What is your reaction to this Ivanka family photo?

Why are they doing that? Why? Why! What does it mean? That color?!! It's nuts!

How lovely for them to dress up, coordinated like that, embodying family harmony.

Absurd, stylish clowns, tweaking the uptight lefties, with just — a color!

Sometimes pure color comes to the fore and overshadows celebrity, politics, and all that is mundane.

An evil color, for an evil family — it's all so wrong, so perfectly wrong.

 

pollcode.com free polls

ADDED: My theory is that they adjusted the color until Arabella was dressed in the shade of blue associated with Tiffany & Co. — see it here — and the other clothing (and the sky) went along for the ride. It came out so cute and hilarious that they put it up on Instagram, and the haters made it viral.

BUT: I looked through her Instagram but didn't see the picture. Others dug all the way back to last year — I didn't go that far — and found it:

"Just five short years ago Jared and Ivanka were dinner-party royalty here in Manhattan. It’s that kind of place."

"They had money, they had youth, they had celebrity. They were thin. I’m told that their manners were impeccable, so you’d never know that his father was an actual felon and her father a de facto one. Besides, you can’t hold family against someone, can you? We don’t choose how we’re born. But from then on, we do make choices, and we’re accountable for those. Jared and Ivanka are about to be held accountable...."

So begins "Was It Worth It, Jared and Ivanka?/The glossiest grifters become Vuitton vagabonds" by Frank Bruni (NYT).

This desire for revenge is so ugly, but I'll take Bruni's word for it that it's impeccable manners within the context of "dinner-party royalty here in Manhattan." He said "here," so he must know.

Your side won, so why can't you be graceful about it? Will your next column be about how Joe Biden would bring everybody together if only the losing side weren't so intransigent?

"President Trump said on Tuesday that the White House’s coronavirus task force would be shut down and replaced with 'something in a different form'..."

"... as the country moved into what he called Phase 2 of a response to a pandemic that has killed nearly 70,000 Americans. 'We will have something in a different form,' Mr. Trump told reporters as he toured a Honeywell mask manufacturing plant in Arizona, where he wore safety goggles but no mask... 'I think we are looking at Phase 2, and we’re looking at other phases,' Mr. Trump said after he was asked whether it was a good idea to shut down the task force while the virus was still spreading through the country. He said that Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the virus response coordinator for the task force, and other top public officials would still be involved in the efforts to address the pandemic after the task force disbanded. 'They will be, and so will other doctors, and so will other experts in the field,' he said, adding, 'We are bringing our country back.'... The task force’s demise would only intensify questions about whether the administration is adequately organized to address the complex, life-or-death decisions related to the virus and give adequate voice to scientists and public health experts in making policy.... It was not clear exactly what might replace the task force. A group led by Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has been functioning as something of a shadow task force. That group is likely to continue working..."

The NYT reports.

"President Trump’s Middle East peace plan... calls for a two-state solution in which Israel would also freeze settlement construction for a period of four years."

"Dubbed by Trump as the 'deal of the century,' the plan sets a number of benchmarks for Palestinians to reach in order to achieve statehood. The benchmarks include fighting terrorism, increasing free speech, and other reforms... 'I was not elected to do small things or shy away from big problems,' Trump said.... The proposal would also give Palestinians more land by offering land swaps south of Gaza. The future state would have to be demilitarized.... The plan was three years in the making and spearheaded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Palestinians have preemptively rejected the proposal, with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas calling Trump a 'dog.'"

The Washington Examiner reports.

"But this summer Ivanka transformed into someone entirely alien and new. She’s a frum Donatella Versace, her platinum hair parted severely down the middle..."

"... clad in increasingly conservative floor-length dresses, with an uncanny-valley beauty that’s the inverse of her father’s slack meat sack, and speaking in the ever-huskier whisper of a phone-sex operator who went to boarding school.... In her rebellious phase, she dyed her hair blue, listened to grunge and country music, and cried over Kurt Cobain’s death, none of which her parents were excited about. She also developed another habit that friends say her father did not like — she became a prodigious reader of great novels, burying her nose in Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Austen, Morrison. In her 20s, she said her favorite book was Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and she had modeled herself on its capitalist heroine, Dagny Taggart.... She was the flashy shiksa daughter of a celebrity showman in Manhattan, and Jared was the buttoned-down Orthodox Jewish real-estate heir from New Jersey, which sounds like a rom-com plot and seemed, at least at first, like a way for Ivanka to break with tradition; she’d gone with a straight arrow for a mate instead of a wild man.... With Jared by her side, Ivanka left her hard-partying crowd for tamer friends.... After her father’s election, Ivanka... told friends she wanted to stay in New York. Jared argued for D.C., saying they needed to protect her father, and, by the way, now anything — everything! — was theirs for the taking. At their synagogue, at least a few people began referring to Ivanka, the first Jewish member of an American First Family, by a new nickname, that of a savior. ...[T]hey called her Esther, after the beautiful Jewish wife of a Persian king who convinced him to cancel an order to annihilate the Jews."

A couple snippets from the long New York Magazine article, "Ivanka Aeternum After the White House, she probably can’t go back to the city that made her. So she has cannily devised another exit strategy" by Vanessa Grigoriadis."

"She’s a frum Donatella Versace...." I know Donatella Versace, the 64-year-old fashion mogul who has aged quite weirdly... but what is "frum"?

Wikipedia says:

Frum (Yiddish: פֿרום‎, lit. 'religious', 'pious') is a word that describes Jewish religious devotion.... The term connotes the observance of Jewish religious law in a way that often exceeds its bare requirements.... Frum can be used in a negative sense for 'hypocritically pious', 'holier-than-thou', 'sanctimonious'; or in a positive sense for 'pious', 'devout', 'God-fearing', and 'upright'.... 

"Secretary of State Mike Pompeo delivered a sobering assessment of the prospects of the Trump administration’s long-awaited Middle East peace plan in a closed-door meeting with Jewish leaders..."

"... saying 'one might argue' that the plan is 'unexecutable' and it might not 'gain traction.' He expressed his hope that the deal isn’t simply dismissed out of hand. 'It may be rejected. Could be in the end, folks will say, "It’s not particularly original, it doesn’t particularly work for me," that is, "it’s got two good things and nine bad things, I’m out,"' Pompeo said in an audio recording of the private meeting obtained by The Washington Post.... 'I get why people think this is going to be a deal that only the Israelis could love,' he said. 'I understand the perception of that. I hope everyone will just give the space to listen and let it settle in a little bit.'... Pompeo, unlike previous secretaries of state, is not overseeing the peace effort... [Jared] Kushner, a real estate scion from New Jersey, and [Jason] Greenblatt, the former chief legal officer for Trump and the Trump Organization, have led the initiative since the president took power. The two men, both practicing Orthodox Jews, did not come in with political experience but have shared a long interest in and connection to Israel.... [After Pompeo's meeting with Jewish leaders,] Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu failed to form a governing coalition and Israel’s parliament voted to dissolve itself, sending the country back to elections in September. Now, if the White House wants to avoid rolling out a peace plan during a sensitive election campaign period for Netanyahu, it will have to wait until at least November, when... the Trump administration will be stepping up its own reelection campaign...."

From "Exclusive: Pompeo delivers unfiltered view of Trump’s Middle East peace plan in off-the-record meeting" (WaPo)(audio at the link).

Do you think that's something Pompeo wanted to get out? Should we presume one of the "Jewish leaders" leaked it? What's the motivation? If Pompeo wanted it out, is it that he believes Kushner has handled it badly and wants the blame to go where it belongs? It seems that failure of the plan is predictable, but why get the failure process going in advance? To make the collapse less sudden?

The highest-rated comment at WaPo is:

What a bunch of morons. Seriously. What did they think would happen when they moved the embassy to Jerusalem? Why did they think prior presidents didn't do that? And now they think they can slide in with a peace plan.

Was never a big fan of the Three Stooges.

So who linked the recording?

NPR's "FACT CHECK: Russian Interference Went Far Beyond 'Facebook Ads' Kushner Described."

At a Time magazine event, Kushner got out an effective talking point.

The whole thing is just a big distraction for the country. You look at what Russia did — buying some Facebook ads to try and sow dissent. And it's a terrible thing, but I think the investigation and all the speculation that's happened over the past two years has had a much harsher impact on our democracy... They said they spent $160,000. I spent $160,000 on Facebook in three hours during the campaign. If you look at the magnitude of what they did and what they accomplished, I think the ensuing investigations have been way more harmful to our country.

Here's NPR's fact check:

The redacted version of Justice Department special counsel Robert Mueller's report revealed a years-long plot by the Russian government to interfere in the U.S. that investigators called "sweeping and systemic."...

As to the amount of money expended on Facebook ads, the company said Russian operatives did spend less than $200,000 on advertising on the platform — but that doesn't account for the organic content the operatives created and shared. Not only were influence specialists within Russia's Internet Research Agency purchasing normal advertisements, they were authoring their own posts, memes and other content as they posed as American users.

They also reached out to politically active Americans, posing as like-minded supporters, and helped organize rallies and other events in the real world.... Cyberattackers also went after political victims in the United States — whose emails and other data were released publicly to embarrass them — and state elections officials and other targets. And there may have been other avenues of interference as well....

By September 2016, two months before the U.S. presidential election, the Internet Research Agency was working with an overall monthly budget that reached over $1.25 million. It employed hundreds of employees, a graphics department, a data analysis department, a search-engine optimization department, an IT department and a finance department, according to an indictment filed last year by Mueller's team....

The U.S. military reportedly blocked the Internet access of the IRA during last year's midterm elections to keep it from interfering with the midterm election. U.S. Cyber Command also targeted Russian cyber operatives, according to a report by The New York Times, with direct messages letting them know that American intelligence was tracking them.

Kushner didn't say the Facebook ads were all there was. His main point, it seems to me, is that what we did to ourselves was far out of proportion to what they did. If we credit the Russians with figuring out how actively and doggedly we'd damage ourselves and aggrandize them, they did amazingly well, but I don't see NPR making that argument. Indeed, I suspect that NPR folks think that everything that worked to hamstring and delegitimize our President wasn't damage at all, but damage control. In that view, the damage was that Trump was elected, and even though he wasn't elected because of Russian interference, it was worth using the Russian interference to distract, trouble, and limit him as much as possible.

And that is the harsh impact on our democracy.

Nancy Pelosi's grammar mistake is telling: "Whomever falls into that net, falls into that net."

I'm reading the front-page WaPo article "House Democrats torn over how aggressively to scrutinize Ivanka Trump, president’s other children."

Presidential children rarely draw the scrutiny of congressional investigators, but Trump’s adult children fill unique roles in his administration, with Ivanka Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, carrying the title of senior advisers to the president while being heavily involved in policy decisions and Capitol Hill negotiations on criminal justice, the Middle East and paid family leave.

“Whomever falls into that net, falls into that net,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday, arguing that Trump’s children are not off limits to investigations. “They are advisers to the president. They have security clearances. This is not their children at home.”

Who uses the word "whom" in speech? You sound stuffy even if you use it correctly, but when you use it incorrectly, you're really letting it show that you're straining at — what? — aloofness, intellectualism, loftiness, distance. It's so revealing.

Of course, "whomever" is wrong, because it's the subject of the phrase. The verb is "falls," and we don't say "him falls," so we don't say "whom falls." Even if you imagine a longer sentence, like, "We will go after whomever/whoever falls into that net," "whomever" is still wrong, because "whoever falls into that net" has to work as a phrase.

The "whomever" mistake evinces strain, and I think Nancy Pelosi is under terrible strain. Her party has taken over the House, and it's under pressure to perform, and one idea that could work but could fail is to investigate investigate investigate. But I don't think it's a good strategy to trawl all over in hope of finding something, anything. You look so irresponsible, and you're asking us to give you more power in the next election. Pelosi uses this metaphor of a net — but it shouldn't be a trawling net. It needs to be a net fixed in place, not wielded by aggressive Democrats. People — like Ivanka and Jared — simply fall into it.

But "whomever" reveals Ivanka and Jared as objects, not subjects. They don't fall. They are pushed.

The Democratic Women — dressed in white to honor the 100th anniversary of women's right to vote — stand and cheer as Trump says just the right things to rouse them out of what I think was supposed to be grim disapproval.

It was so much fun to see this creation of festive happiness:



Let me break this scene down:

0:00-0:12 — "No one has benefitted more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58% of the new jobs created in the last year," says Trump, leaning into "women." He pauses, nods and looks around.

0:15 — We see the array of women in white, keeping a solemn look at first. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez turns around and causes the women behind her to smile.



0:17-0:19 — This gesture happens — one woman  (who?) puts 2 elbows in the air and points 2 thumbs down at herself.



Is she receiving a signal (from Nancy Pelosi?) or simply deciding on her own? The thumbs are shaken and the woman nods her head vigorously. Her reaction sets off the woman 3 seats over to her left (who?), but there's a quick edit, so we don't see how that interaction progresses.

0:19: — We're shifted to this super-happy blonde woman (who?). The 2 other women are standing and clapping but looking like it pains them to have to approve of anything.



0:23 — Some real celebration breaks out (amid some dubiousness):



0:24 — Something's happening to the right of the screen that's exciting everyone, even bow-tie guy:



0:23-0:30 — The frame opens up and pans as if to help us see what they were pointing at, then the frame jumps back to the women we were seeing before, and they are clapping with arms extended and pumping fists in the air and laughing.



0:32 — Even AOC is standing and laughing (though not clapping):



0:36 — We get back to Trump, head back, blissful smile.... Nancy's applauding (or playing here comes the crocodile):



0:41-0:44 — The women sit down, and Trump nods a few times, and a slight smirk grows. I feel like he's thinking, Yeah, that's what I like.



He suddenly shakes his head to get into the character that works to deliver the presumably improvised line: "You were not supposed to do that."



There's an impish, confidential tone that, to me, reads as: Give me any kind of chance, and you will love me.

0:46 — The congresswoman in the headscarf is doubled over in elation. And look at the other women in this shot. Now, notice the man (with the glasses in his mouth, perhaps irritated to see that the women are going wild and annoyed that shallow charm like this works):





0:53-1:03 — "All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before."

1:07 — The reaction begins. One woman is standing (who?). AOC is talking and turning to the woman on her right, making her presence felt. Notice how the woman on her left leans away from AOC, perhaps tired of her continual efforts at looking like a powerful influencer:



1:12 — AOC is not the last one to stand. The woman on her left is (and she doesn't stand until 1:18):



1:25-1:27 — With one finger held aloft, Trump improvises: "Don’t sit yet. You are going to like this." There's an immediate, warm laugh from the assembly, and the instant he hears it, his face shows gratification:



He really does feed off the energy of the crowd. This moment is like what he gets (in much larger doses) at this rallies.

The hand position changes from upward pointing to the OK position. Given all the talk about the KKK over the weekend, I want to get out ahead of any stupidity about Trump's OK gesture. Here's Wikipedia on the 4chan prank of calling the OK sign a white power symbol.

1:30 — "And exactly one century after the Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in the Congress than ever before." This is the dynamic in the middle of the word "before":



Nancy is calling on her people to rise.

1:45 — And here's how it looks as he gets to the end of "before":



1:47 — They're all up, and though AOC is looking dyspeptic (for an instant), there's lots of celebration and cheering:



2:03 — We see the family reaction  (with Ivanka looked so much like Ivana):



2:04- We see the women in white again, cheering. Many hands in the air, fist-pumping, pointing. AOC leaps forward in a big high 5 that connects with no one (2:06).

2:20 — A U.S.A. cheer begins off screen, and the on-screen women in white pick up the cheer, with rhythmic clapping.

2:30 — The camera closes in on AOC. She's a camera magnet. She had been doing the clapping and chanting, but stops and bows her head. What is she thinking?



What is that man doing to us?

"Some of the strongest advocates for the bill and conservative reform seem to be those with personal connections to the criminal-justice system."

"Much of the public and private heavy lifting in building support for the bill has been done by Jared Kushner, who made a rare appearance on Sean Hannity’s show to promote it and is reportedly responsible for securing an endorsement of the bill from Fox News. Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, spent over a year in federal prison after being convicted for white-collar crimes, in 2005."

From "The Improbable Success of a Criminal-Justice-Reform Bill Under Trump" (The New Yorker).

The important news is not that President Trump is considering Jared Kushner for Chief of Staff...

.... it's that "Twitter Users Troll Jared Kushner Over Chief Of Staff Report" (HuffPo). You might think that article was written because there really was some funny stuff to collect. You would be wrong. I read it. Check my work if you don't trust me to save you the trouble.

"Unless the miracle of all miracles happens, I would acknowledge that he’s dead. That’s based on everything — intelligence coming from every side."

Said Trump, interviewed by the NYT in "In Shift on Khashoggi Killing, Trump Edges Closer to Acknowledging a Saudi Role."

Later, before leaving on a trip to Montana, he was asked what the consequences would be if Saudi Arabia’s culpability was established.

“Well, it’ll have to be very severe,” he said. “I mean, it’s bad, bad stuff.”

But it is not at all clear what Mr. Trump has in mind, given the central role that Saudi Arabia plays in the president’s strategy for the Middle East and the web of ties that have developed between the prince and the White House, particularly with Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner....

Trump said in the interview it was still “a little bit early” in the process to draw definitive conclusions about who ordered the killing. But he expressed no doubt that the truth would come out soon.... American intelligences agencies... are divided on the degree of responsibility that can be pinned on the prince....

During his conversation with The Times, Mr. Trump was uncharacteristically guarded.... In part, Mr. Trump acknowledged, that caution reflected his recognition that the Khashoggi case now posed a bigger challenge to him than other issues “because it’s taken on a bigger life than it would normally take on.”...