Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast, a series of discussions about American politics and the Trump presidency for the New Spectator USA website.

I'm joined today by Matthew R.J. Brodsky, who is a senior fellow at the Security Studies Group and a Middle East and geopolitical analyst, as well as a writer.

And you wrote an excellent piece yesterday for us on Spectator USA

about the glaring questions going unanswered about Jamal Khashoggi.

Exactly.

And it's sort of inevitable that this story, this disturbing, hugely important story, has become a kind of political

cat fight in America already. I mean, you directly, actually, and me this morning, accused

of being part of a smear campaign on Jamal Khashoggi. And I think, I'm obviously biased, but I think

it's just for answering, asking,

fairly straightforward questions about who he was and what he was doing.

Why is it turning into this toxic fight,

like everything else in America at sea?

I think we've put this type of issue now

into what is the ongoing culture war in the United States.

The Kavanaugh hearings for Supreme Court wasn't about a Supreme Court hearing.

It had to turn into a Me Too movement moment, which brought it into the culture war.

And so here we are again with this, where if you are saying anything that even remotely questions the narrative,

which has been determined already, that narrative, of course, is how do we make this hurt Trump

in the midterm election? So how do we get back at him? In which case, then you just simply

present this individual Khashokti,

as a nice, beautiful reformer who was doing all he could to bring democracy to the region.

And it's really taken on a new life in the United States media, which, if you're from the old

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