“Things happen.”

This is how our president, who took an oath to defend the Constitution and uphold the law, responded on Tuesday to a question on whether the man in the fancy robes sitting next to him in the White House was a murderer.

The robe guy was none other than Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He wants to be a big player in the modern world. But he has a few issues.

For starters, the nation that Salman runs still drags criminals into public squares and chops off their heads with a sword — just like it did back in those fun-loving ancient days of desert tents, camels, slave-trading and husbands with multiple wives. But when it comes to modern times and the United States, the issues with Saudi Arabia and Prince Salman are even more troubling.

The FBI has uncovered a mountain of evidence that Saudi officials helped the gang of Islamist zealots who carried out the deadliest attack on U.S. soil on Sept. 11, 2001. And six years ago, the CIA concluded that Salman himself ordered a 15-man team of Saudi intelligence operatives to murder and dismember Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born legal resident of the United States and a columnist for the Washington Post.

On Nov. 18, Trump dismissed Khashoggi’s brutal killing as “things happen.” The president also added this bit of wisdom: “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about. Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”

“People didn’t like that gentleman? Things happen?"

Is this an American president talking about a real murder of a person who had legal residency or a two-bit actor auditioning for a low-budget mob movie? Who talks like that anyway when discussing a murder?

As for the Saudi connection to 9/11, Trump, who comments on just about anything, seems to have taken a vow of silence on whether he thinks he should hold the Saudis' feet to the fire of truth and justice. In fact, Trump has done so much dancing around the question on the Saudi link to 9/11 that he ought to be a contestant on “Dancing with The Stars.”

In case you wondered, Khashoggi’s fatal transgression was that he evolved into something of a journalistic thorn in the pride of Prince Salman and Saudi Arabia’s backward customs. He was not exactly a radical revolutionary, though. Khashoggi wasn’t calling for........

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