Editorials of The Times

The question now is not whether the Saudis’ latest explanation for Jamal Khashoggi’s death is credible, but whom do they think they’re fooling. In the autocratic world of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, what common people think is irrelevant; what matters is whether throwing his hit men under the bus is enough to satisfy President Donald Trump.

Trump has been longing for some way to hang on to his soul mate Prince Mohammed and lucrative Saudi arms deals from Day 1, and he seemed to breathe a sigh of relief over the story the Saudis concocted after more than two weeks of lies and evasions. It was a “good first step” and a “big step,” Trump said Friday night. Asked whether he found it credible, he replied, “I do.”

He is in a distinct minority. The Saudi story has been widely dismissed as a pathetic attempt to acknowledge what has become undeniable — that a band of 15 Saudi agents flew in to Istanbul on the day Khashoggi was expected at the Saudi Consulate and killed him there. It also insulates Prince Mohammed, the wielder of real power in Saudi Arabia, from any responsibility.

In this narrative, there went out a general order to round up dissidents living abroad, but somehow it got garbled in transmission, so when the Saudis learned of Khashoggi’s plans, the deputy director of intelligence, Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri, dispatched a team to pick him up. According to this version of the tale, Khashoggi put up a fight and got killed, and a local collaborator was given the body to dispose of, perhaps in pieces and in suitcases.

So now the 15 agents, plus a driver and two consular staff — essentially all the witnesses minus the consul general, who returned to Saudi Arabia and has not been heard from since — have been arrested, while Assiri and a close aide to the crown prince, Saud al-Qahtani, and a few other intelligence officials, have been fired. Misdeed acknowledged, culprits punished, crown prince cleared, Trump satisfied.

Uh-huh. Among the many problems with this story is that nobody will seriously accept that a mild, 60-year-old journalist put up such a fight that he had to be killed, and it does not explain why one of the agents sent to Istanbul was carrying a bone saw, or why the Turks said they had evidence that Khashoggi was tortured and dismembered. Nor does it explain why it took the Saudis more than two weeks to acknowledge even that Khashoggi was dead.

And even in this narrative, why was Khashoggi deemed so great a threat that the Saudi security apparatus tried to kidnap him, even if the goal was not to kill him? A well-connected Saudi journalist, he had fled into self-imposed exile in the United States when Prince Mohammed began rounding up critics at home, and he frequently criticized the prince in his Washington Post columns. That is a deadly threat?

But then the only thing we are asked to believe in this yarn is that Prince Mohammed, the reformer who allowed women to drive, would never condone such violence. No, not the royal strongman who imprisoned many of his cousins to shake them down, kidnapped Lebanon’s prime minister, started a disastrous war in Yemen, broke relations with Canada over a critical tweet, rounded up critics, sentenced a blogger to 1,000 lashes and much more.

Trump is deluded if he really believes the Saudi cover-up can end the matter. The president seemed to acknowledge a few days ago that the Khashoggi murder is “bad, bad stuff,” but he seems reluctant to understand that so is his (and his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s) buddy, the crown prince.

Nothing more honest can be expected from Saudi Arabia. If America’s leadership in the world is to retain any credibility, the president must demand a United Nations-backed investigation by respected and independent officials, and he must ask Turkey to provide its tapes and other evidence. He should suspend weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and ask NATO allies to do the same. And, what may be most salutary, he should signal to members of the House of Saud that he believes what so many of them believe, that Mohammed bin Salman has become toxic.

Finally Trump must ensure that the remains of his American neighbor, an honest Saudi journalist who suffered a barbarous end for simply speaking truth to power, be returned to his family.

Jair Bolsonaro is a right-wing Brazilian who holds repulsive views. He has said that if he had a homosexual son, he’d prefer him dead; that a female colleague in the Parliament was too ugly to rape; that Afro-Brazilians are lazy and fat; that global warming amounts to “greenhouse fables.” He is nostalgic for the generals and torturers who ran Brazil for 20 years. Next Sunday, in the second round of voting, Bolsonaro will most likely be elected president of Brazil.

Behind this frightening prospect is a story that has become alarmingly common among the world’s democracies. Brazil is emerging from its worst-ever recession; a broad investigation called Operation Car Wash has revealed wanton corruption in government; a popular former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is in prison for corruption; his successor, Dilma Rousseff, was impeached; her successor, Michel Temer, is under investigation; violent crime is rampant. Brazilians are desperate for change.

Against this background, Bolsonaro’s gross views are construed as candor, his obscure career as a congressman as the promise of an outsider who will clean the stables and his pledge of an iron fist as hope of a reprieve from a record average of 175 homicides a day last year. An evangelical Christian, he preaches a blend of social conservatism and economic liberalism, though he confesses to only a superficial understanding of economics.

Sound familiar? He is the latest in long line of populists who have ridden a wave of discontent, frustration and desperation to the highest office in each of their countries. Not surprisingly, he is often described as a Brazilian Donald Trump.

Should he reach the presidential palace, one loser will be the environment, and specifically the Amazon rain forests, sometimes known as the lungs of the earth for their role in absorbing carbon dioxide. Bolsonaro has promised to undo many of the protections for the tropical forests to open more lands for Brazil’s powerful agribusiness. He has raised the prospect of withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement, scrapping the Environment Ministry and stopping the creation of indigenous reserves — all this in a country until recently praised for its leadership on protection of the environment.

It is not only the “beef, Bible and bullet” message that has brought Bolsonaro to the fore. The popular da Silva remained a strong contender despite his imprisonment until the Supreme Electoral Court ruled in August that he was ineligible to run. For a substitute, the left-leaning Workers’ Party (P.T.) turned to Fernando Haddad, a former professor, education minister and mayor of São Paulo. Though Haddad survived the first round of voting, he has failed to overcome his party’s association with corruption and mismanagement, which has fed something of an “anyone-but-the-P.T.” spirit. Polls show him far behind Bolsonaro in the second round.

The choice is for Brazilians to make. But it is a sad day for democracy when disarray and disappointment drive voters to distraction and open the door to offensive, crude and thuggish populists.