The following things happened, in real life. Donald Trump tweeted a photoshopped picture purporting to show the Saudi prince Al-Waleed bin Talal palling around with Trump’s rival Megyn Kelly of Fox News. The picture is a fake.
Prince Alwaleed is the nephew of the late King Abdullah and the grandson of the first Saudi king. He runs the Kingdom Holding Company, which like Trump is in the real estate business, plus banking, media, and lots of other stuff. The prince is the thirty-fourth richest man in the world, according to Forbes, with a net worth around $28 billion. That’s richer than Trump, but who’s counting.
So Prince Alwaleed, who has previously been critical of Trump’s fascistic anti-Muslim performances, today tweeted this diss of Trump to his more than four million followers:
Trump:You base your statements on photoshopped pics?I bailed you out twice;a 3rd time,maybe?
https://t.co/Raco0mvusp https://t.co/jStBl7Ghia
— الوليد بن طلال (@Alwaleed_Talal) January 28, 2016
Vox explains the bailout context:
It appears that Alwaleed really has bailed Trump out twice, by purchasing Trump assets. In 1991, Trump had racked up $900 million in debts. He ceded his yacht — a former James Bond prop known as the Trump Princess — to creditors. Alwaleed then purchased it for $281 million, effectively paying Trump’s creditors for him.
As part of the same bankruptcy, Trump was forced to sell the ritzy Plaza Hotel in New York. In 1995, the banks that took it from Trump sold it to Alwaleed and a group of Singaporean investors.
Trump told the New York Times that Alwaleed “paid too much for the hotel. He wanted that hotel so badly, and I put him through the wringer and made a great deal.”
“Of course,” the Times notes, “it cost the Saudi-Singapore partnership $75 million less than Mr. Trump had spent for the same building seven years earlier.”
Trump has previously called the prince “dopey” on Twitter so presumably this spat isn’t over.
Just to review, the frontrunner for the Republican primary, when not re-tweeting white supremacists or folks calling a broadcaster a “bimbo,” is getting into social media tiffs with a Saudi prince over an obviously fake photo. Ladies and gentlemen, your 2016 Republican party!
In other Trump news, the Trump campaign is now saying, in response to Ted Cruz‘s challenge of a one-on-one debate, that Trump will debate the Texas senator as soon as the Canadian-born Cruz gets a ruling from a federal judge that he is eligible to run for president. Trump’s campaign manager said:
Once you’ve gotten that ruling from the federal judge and you’re the last man standing in this presidential contest next to Donald Trump, we’ll be happy to have a debate with you one on one, anywhere you want, because that’s the way the system works. But, as it stands right now, we don’t even know if Ted Cruz is legally eligible to run for president of the United States.
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post today announced that they will attach the following not to all stories about Trump: “Note to our readers: Donald Trump is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, birther and bully who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.”