On Monday, shortly after Donald Trump gave a speech at the Israeli parliament, he traveled to Egypt to sign a memorandum related to the Israeli-Hamas ceasefire deal. While in Egypt, the president sat down with the country’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, and said something rather strange.
He told reporters that the reason Egypt was chosen as the location to sign this historic peace deal was because Sissi had been “very helpful” and was a “great leader.” The president also said he wanted to “thank” the Egyptian leader, who he said had “been my friend right from the beginning, during the campaign against Crooked Hillary Clinton.”
Now, you may be wondering: Why would Trump even mention Clinton in that moment?
Well, during his 2016 run against Clinton, Trump singled out Sissi, who came to power in 2013 by military coup, for all sorts of inexplicable praise. Just a few weeks before Election Day, as his campaign was running out of money and it appeared he was going to lose, Trump took a one-on-one meeting with the Egyptian leader. After the meeting, Trump called Sissi a “fantastic guy” and promised that, if elected, the United States would be a “loyal friend” to Egypt.
There’s no reason an American president should be arranging meetings for a family member with the head of state of another country.
When Trump was elected, he made good on that promise. He brought Sissi to be one of his first guests at the White House and showered him with praise. He gave Egypt nearly $200 million that his own State Department opposed, then he gave them more than $1 billion after that.
Last year, thanks to a bombshell report from The Washington Post, we learned that back in 2019, the Trump administration allegedly shut down an investigation involving a $10 million cash withdrawal from Egypt’s national bank.
According to the Post, classified U.S. intelligence indicated that Sissi “sought to give Trump $10 million to boost his 2016 presidential campaign.” The Post went on to report: “Investigators had also sought to learn if money from Sissi might have factored into Trump’s decision in the final days of his run for the White House to inject his campaign with $10 million of his own money.”
At the time, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign said the reporting was “textbook Fake News.”
In the end, what potentially could have been a bribe was never traced, and no one knows, to this day, officially, why Trump, all these years later, is still thanking the strongman leader of Egypt for something he did to help Trump in his campaign against Clinton.
At that same event on Monday in Egypt, Trump was caught on a hot mic seemingly trying to set up a meeting between his son Eric Trump, who manages the family business, and the president of Indonesia.
Eric Trump has no job in the government; there’s no reason an American president should be arranging meetings for a family member with the head of state of another country. That said, earlier this month, Eric Trump was promoting the family’s brand new golf course deal in Indonesia, calling it one of the most “stunning golf destinations.” And now Trump, in his official capacity, appeared to be hooking up his son with the president of the country hosting the new Trump family boondoggle.
That’s not, of course, to be confused with the family boondoggle in Qatar, where the Trumps also plan to build a golf course and hotel.
You may remember that during Trump’s first term, he called Qatar “a funder of terrorism at a very high level.” However, this time around, on top of closing a deal for a Trump luxury development in Qatar, the country has given the president a $400 million luxury jet, which he says he plans to re-fit at taxpayer expense for his own use as president, and then keep for his presidential library after he leaves office.
Earlier this month, Trump announced that if Qatar is attacked, the United States will respond as if we have been attacked. He has basically given them fake NATO membership on his own say-so. And on Friday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the United States would host a Qatari air force facility at the Mountain Home Airbase in Idaho.
Expectedly, Hegseth’s announcement was quickly met with backlash. The former “Fox and Friends Weekend” co-host then had to issue what he called an “important clarification.” Hegseth said that Qatar was not building its own airbase on American soil; instead, they would simply be allowed to use an existing airbase in Idaho, which would remain under U.S. jurisdiction.
But the president is keeping their plane and the family is building their big golf course and hotel, and presumably whatever else they want, because that’s the way the presidency works now under Trump: You put money in his pocket, and give money to his family, and he hooks you up with basically whatever you want out of the pockets of the American people from the U.S. Treasury, all while the federal government remains at a standstill.
It’s one thing to have the president leave the country and fly to another country during a shutdown, like Trump did on Monday, but it’s another thing to have the U.S. government fund another country’s government while we’re not funding ours. Last week, Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, finalized a deal to send $20 billion of U.S. taxpayer dollars to Argentina. We are bailing out their currency, for some reason. Argentina’s currency has dropped 27% in value already this year. But don’t worry, it’s just a loan, right? We’ll get it back? I’m not too sure about that. The International Monetary Fund has had to bail out Argentina 23 times, and the country owes it more money than any other country on earth. The most recent IMF bailout was just in April, and even that wasn’t enough to keep their economy and their peso from continuing to tank. But Bessent, nevertheless, just gave Argentina $20 billion of your money to prop them up, even though we have almost no trade with them, and if their economy or their currency collapses, it would likely have no effect on us. There goes $20 billion of your money to buy nearly worthless pesos while American hospitals are white-knuckling it through a government shutdown. Even after the infusion, according to a report from CNBC, the markets have reacted in such a way that indicates the $20 billion may not be enough, which, presumably, best case, means we’ll never get that money back, or, worst case, we’ll give them even more. Why, when our own government is shut down, are we giving Argentina billions to keep its government going? I’m not sure, but there are at least two billionaires who are very close to Bessent who have made big bets on the health of Argentina’s economy. So, for those rich guy friends of Bessent, including Bessent’s former mentor on Wall Street, they stand to make a lot of money if the U.S. taxpayer starts propping up that failing country, and they stand to lose a lot if we don’t. There goes $20 billion of your money to buy nearly worthless pesos in Buenos Aires while Yellowstone shuts down, and people who work for the TSA don’t get paid, and American hospitals are white-knuckling it through a government shutdown with no end in sight. This is why every opposition movement to every authoritarian government everywhere on earth focuses on the corruption, self-dealing and self-enrichment of the supposed strongman leader, his family and his cronies. What happens when you lose the rule of law? When you lose a professional government? When the democratic right to replace your leaders is taken away from you? What happens is that the strongman and his cronies get very rich, and they think they don’t have to answer to anyone ever. They get everything for themselves, while for everyone else — for regular people — everything crumbles.
Rachel Maddow
Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award-winning “The Rachel Maddow Show” Mondays at 9 p.m. ET on MSNBC. “The Rachel Maddow Show” features Maddow’s take on the biggest stories of the day, political and otherwise, including in-depth analysis and stories no other shows in cable news will cover.
Allison Detzel is an editor/producer for MS NOW.
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