Photo: Sayed Baqer AlKamel/NurPhoto/Sipa via AP

But Al Khalifa hasn’t been the only Arab autocrat to receive a rhetorical blank check from the U.S. president. Take Egypt. Trump hailed President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as a “fantastic guy” and, only hours after his meeting with the Bahraini king, was photographed touching a glowing orb with the Egyptian strongman at the opening of an anti-extremism center in Riyadh. You’ll never guess what happened next: “On his return to Egypt,” reported the New York Times last May, “the Sisi government pushed through new news media restrictions and prosecuted a rival political leader in the courts, further squeezing political rights and free speech.” Take Saudi Arabia, too. In March, Trump welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, to the Oval Office, where he described the U.S.- Saudi relationship as “probably the strongest it’s ever been,” and told MBS that his father, King Salman, had “made a very wise decision” by appointing the prince as both his heir and de facto ruler of the country. Last week — less than two months after his visit to the White House — MBS ordered the arrest of 10 prominent Saudi activists, including a group of women’s rights campaigners. (So much for “Saudi Arabia’s Arab Spring.”) Words matter. And Trump’s words, time and again, seem to provide aid and comfort to some of the world’s worst rulers. In the case of Bahrain, for example, it is indisputable that Trump gave the Gulf monarchy the green light last year to kill and torture its opponents. You don’t have to take my word for it, or even the word of Human Rights Watch. Listen to the testimonies of Bahraini torture victims themselves. On May 24, 2017, three days after the U.S. president’s photo-op with the Bahraini king, human rights lawyer Ebrahim Sarhan was summoned to the headquarters of Bahrain’s fearsome National Security Agency. Upon his arrival, as United Nations human rights experts later documented, he was “allegedly beaten for around half an hour by the agents, who … forced his legs apart in order to kick him in the genitals” and “also given electrical shocks and repeatedly insulted.” When Sarhan tried to remind the agents of his legal rights, they laughed at him and explicitly cited Trump. “Hahaha, you have to forget the law and human rights, the U.S. president has changed and the situation has changed, and what the U.S. president wants to have has arrived to him, and from now on we will do with you what we want,” one of the agents declared, according to written testimony from Sarhan.