Two months ago, President Donald Trump announced at a U.S.-Saudi investment forum held in Riyadh that “far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

His remarks seemed to suggest that Washington would turn a blind eye to any human-rights violations committed by the Saudi regime.

“I believe it is God’s job to sit in judgment — my job is to defend America and to promote the fundamental interests of stability, prosperity and peace,” Trump said before securing a promise from the Saudis to invest $600 billion in the U.S. economy, along with a $142-billion arms deal.

Last week, the Saudi interior ministry’s announcement of the execution of a well-known journalist after being convicted of questionable treason and terrorism charges, put Trump’s policy pivot to the test.

The White House has so far made no public statement. The U.S. State Department did not respond for a request for comment by time of publication.

No details of Turki al-Jasser’s execution were made public, but according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), al-Jasser was convicted on trumped-up charges. His real crime, the group contends, was writing on X (then Twitter) a series of posts alleging corruption by members of the Saudi royal family.

“We are outraged by Saudi Arabia’s execution of prominent journalist Turki al-Jasser, who was detained for seven years because the regime believed he reported on allegations of corruption within the Saudi royal family,” said Carlos Martínez de la Serna, chief program officer of the CPJ.

Al-Jasser, was, according to the organization Reporters Without Borders, the anonymous author of a Twitter account called Kashkool, which “linked members of the Saudi royal family to alleged acts of corruption and human rights abuses.”

The Saudi regime has recently increased its use of capital punishment. According to Reprieve, a London-based non-governmental organization opposed to the death penalty, 330 people were executed in Saudi Arabia in 2024, compared to the 172 who were executed the previous year.

Despite Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS)’s assurance in an interview with The Atlantic in 2022 that the death penalty would only be used for murder, 150 were executed for non-lethal crimes last year, according to the human-rights organization.

On May 24 and 25, two Egyptian nationals were executed in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of drug offenses. Twenty-six other Egyptians are on death row for similar offenses.

Robert George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University and former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Religious Freedom, told the Register it is important to take any regime to task for violations of human rights.

“The United States signed the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. I’m proud that we did. The ‘Declaration’ was framed and signed in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. It represented an international effort to establish international standards of human rights. In my opinion, it is our nation’s duty, and the duty of our leaders, not only to honor the rights set for in the ‘Declaration’ but to promote these rights worldwide,” he said.

“One way of doing this is to call out gross violations of these rights whenever they occur — no matter what regime is perpetrating those violations, and no matter who the victims are,” George said.

He recalled challenging the Saudi government in 2015 for violating the religious-freedom rights of a minority religious group, the Ahmadiyya Muslims, by arresting and imprisoning them.

“The Saudi leadership initially claimed — preposterously — that the men were “drug addicts” who had been detained in order to provide them with mental health care. Our commission refused to play along with this nonsense,” George said.

“We continued calling attention to the fact that the Ahmadiyya men were being persecuted for their religious beliefs. Eventually, the Saudi government relented and released them,” he added. “I submit that we did the right thing in standing up for the human rights of our fellow human beings in a foreign land.”

While the U.S. has remained silent about al-Jasser’s execution, the United Nations on June 10 called for the execution of the Egyptians convicted of drug offenses to be halted.

“The Government’s claim that applying the death penalty for offences such as smuggling, receiving and distributing narcotic substances under the Narcotics and Psychotropic Substances Act complies with international law is incompatible with its legal obligations under International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights,” said Morris Tidball-Binz, the special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, in a statement published on the U.N.’s website.

Trump’s diplomatic pragmatism is nothing new; Biden also sought to foster a cordial relationship with the Saudi regime despite its human-rights transgressions. Yet, in 2020, during the presidential campaign, Biden vowed to make Saudi Arabia a “pariah state.”

His harsh words were in response to the suspicious death of another Saudi journalist. Two years earlier, journalist and dissident Jamal Ahmad Hamza Khashoggi, had been found dead after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he had been living in exile. The Central Intelligence Agency later determined that Khashoggi had been assassinated by MBS.

However, by 2021, Biden had signed a lucrative arms deal with the Saudis and failed to follow up on his pledge to crack down on the regime.

For his part, Trump at first called Khashoggi’s murder “one of the worst cover-ups in the history of cover-ups,” but months later cast doubt on the CIA’s assessment that the Crown Prince was involved. “Maybe [MBS] did and maybe he didn’t,” he said.

“If we abandon Saudi Arabia, it would be a terrible mistake,” Trump told reporters in November 2018. “We’re with Saudi Arabia. We’re staying with Saudi Arabia.”