In President Trump’s first 22 months in office, most of the scandals that have made the front page of the New York Times have been self-inflicted: the dysfunctional roll-out of the Muslim travel ban; the firing of FBI Director James Comey; the impolitic potshots on Twitter; the disastrous Charlottesville press conference. Name a crisis, and it’s more than likely it was initiated by the president’s own hand.

The mysterious disappearance and likely murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a Washington Post columnist and Saudi dissident, by a 15-man Saudi hit squad dispatched to Turkey on the orders of the al-Saud royal family is one of those incidents that has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump. While Democrats on Capitol Hill, editorial writers at the Washington Post, and progressive grassroots organizations have tried to make a connection between Khashoggi’s killing and Trump’s glad-handing of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the only entity at fault for this sorry episode is an oppressive Saudi government that has been kidnapping and detaining dissidents and political activists for decades.