Next week, Saudi Arabia will host the Future Investment Initiative, a big, shiny conference known as “Davos in the Desert” that brings together tech gurus, media conglomerates, and Wall Street titans, all of whom rely on that sweet, sweet, Saudi cash to make their businesses run. Or at least, it used to bring those people together. This year, though, things look slightly different on account of the growing consensus that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman ordered the murder of journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul and, according to Turkish officials, was killed and dismembered therein. While former White House official Dina Powell will still attend on behalf of Goldman Sachs [UPDATE: She’s out!], everyone from the C.E.O.s of Uber, JPMorgan, BlackRock, and Blackstone, to the Finance Ministers of France and the Netherlands, to The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times, has pulled out of the event, following said murder allegations. And on Thursday, the one guy who was thought to have his bags packed and his airplane sweats ready to go announced that he, too, was out: Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.

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For all of the major companies and executives understandably dropping like flies, Mnuchin’s decision not to attend the conference actually comes as a shock, given that his boss, Donald Trump, has spent the past week defending Saudi Arabia, not just insisting that the country’s leaders get the due process he never affords anyone, but going so far as to float theories as to why his pal M.B.S. is probably innocent. Yet there were signs on Wednesday that Mnuchin was beginning to waver, telling reporters, “for now we are [attending],” but that he would “revisit the decision” on Thursday, and would “make a decision . . . based on Secretary [Mike] Pompeo’s report.” (Pompeo, of course, just wrapped up a chummy trip to Riyadh, where he met with both M.B.S. and Saudi King Salman.)

It’s not totally clear what changed Mnuchin’s mind, besides the (understandable!) possibility that the secretary got cold feet at the thought of being alone in a room with and Mohammed “Bone Saw” bin Salman. Presumably, this is not a case of Mnuchin taking a stand against Trump, whom he’s been more than happy to defend for nearly two years, including the president’s decision to praise Nazis and to call football players exercising their First Amendment rights “sons of bitches”.