As days pass and Donald Trump equivocates over the apparent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, the president’s allies are working overtime to justify his foreign policy toward Saudi Arabia. According to reporting by the Post, several House Republicans have mounted a whisper campaign to discredit Khashoggi—or at least, to knock his reputation down a few notches—based on his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and his role as an embedded journalist who covered Osama bin Laden. Trump administration aides are reportedly aware of the rumors, and are “being careful to not encourage the disparagement,” but they’s also “doing little to contest it.”

Trump is hardly the first Republican—or Democrat, for that matter—to excuse Saudi misbehavior in the name of cynical realpolitik. “Whether it was any Republican in power, they would have made a lot the same moves,“ explained Jared Holt of Right Wing Watch, a group that monitors conservative media. But he has also set new standards for how little a president need pretend to care about human rights when an arms contract, or oil prices, are on the line. ”One thing that the Trump era has done is, like a strong paint remover, [it] has really dissolved the sheen and veneer off the machine,” Holt observed. The campaign to discredit Khashoggi, which might have once been executed surreptitiously, is now front and center on Twitter and echoing on Fox News.

As most right-wing conspiracies do, the Khashoggi smears gained momentum in the bowels of the MAGA Internet (with an assist from a Saudi botnet). Though Khashoggi’s disappearance didn’t initially rattle the Republican Party, which is trying to remain laser-focused on midterms—Khashoggi’s name did not come up “at all” during the Heritage Foundation’s President’s Club Meeting, said one conservative activist who attended—the conspiracy machine leapt into action as soon as the White House started getting blowback in the media. Fueled by a sense, as CRTV’s __Jon Miller __ put it, that the media had embarked on another “insane” quest to get Trump, his supporters painted Khashoggi as a rabid Islamist and Muslim Brotherhood sympathizer opposed to Mohammed bin Salman’s attempts to “reform” the Kingdom.

“DON’T MOURN FOR KHASHOGGI,” tweeted David Horowitz, a prominent conservative reactionary. “He was a Muslim Brotherhood operative, a pro-jihad, pro-Iranian, pro–[Tayyip] Erdoğan Jew-hater. A supporter of Iran. Basically he died as a warrior on the wrong side of the war on terror.” “He’s just a democrat reformer journalist holding a RPG with jihadists,” wrote PJ Media’s Patrick Poole, tweeting a photo of a 1988 article written by Khashoggi, which included a photo of him with al-Qaeda leaders. (The tweet quickly spread and was eventually picked up by Donald Trump Jr.) Fox News’s Harris Faulkner echoed the claims on Thursday’s Outnumbered, insisting, “some things have come out, and we’re just reporting the facts . . . throughout his career, he was a government spokesperson for the royal family, he worked for Prince Turki [bin Faisal Al Saud] when he was in Washington, D.C., and, at times, had written and worked with some Muslim Brother[hood] members in Saudi Arabia.” (When Twitter began cracking down on bots tweeting Khashoggi smears, the right’s suspicions of a grand left-wing conspiracy seemed confirmed: “Remember, deposed Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns major shares of Twitter, and Alwaleed opposes current Crown Prince’s government,” one far-right account wrote in a tweet quickly picked up by Instapundit.)