I have come to miss the era when Western politicians gave lip service to human rights concerns. Trump believes that human rights apply to him alone, and the rest of the world is rapidly finding the same rising tide of all sorts of bigotries: nationalist, sexist, racist and religionist.
Democracy, my dears, is in deep peril*. It never was that perfect, what with power and money being the most addicting (il)legal drugs of all, but at least in some countries the use of that greedy power was disguised to appeal to certain fairly commonly accepted social norms. This is less common today.
Thus, we see tweets like this one, about the murder of a Saudi journalist (who had permanent residency rights in the US) inside the Saudi embassy in Turkey:
BREAKING: #Saudi and #Turkey agree to form a joint team to investigate #Khashoggi disappearance.— Joyce Karam (@Joyce_Karam) October 11, 2018
Turkey Presidency made announcement and said it’s based on Saudi official request.
It's as if Jeffrey Dahmer was appointed to the team investigating his horrible crimes! But only wet-paperbag idealists see anything wrong with that. And, as Trump has explicitly noted, the Saudis are too important trading partners for the US to punish in any way.
But then the Saudis are our Best Friends Forever**, despite the powerful Saudi clerics' views on women's rights (nonexistent, pretty much), and the way petro-dollars are disseminating those views in many other countries.
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* Both because in the US (and certainly also elsewhere) voting is suppressed, certain groups are disenfranchised on purpose and the voting results are often impossible to properly verify, but also because far too many voters are uninformed and tend to "vote the bums out" or want change for the sake of change, even when the new rulers will be every bit as corrupt and greedy.
** This is not about the Saudi people. The ones I have met have all been wonderful warm people with good values. It's about the Saudi state and the form of extreme religion they uphold.