During his trip last week to the Middle East, Donald Trump set off alarms stateside when he was caught on a hot mic talking to President Prabowo Subianto of Indonesia about his request to meet with the president’s son Eric, who’s not a government official.
In a private exchange picked up by microphones, the Indonesian leader asked to meet Eric Trump, to which the president answered, “I’ll have Eric call you,” calling his adult son a “good boy.”
And Eric Trump didn’t seem afraid to put the subtext of that exchange out in the open.
In comments Thursday to pro-Trump content creator Eric Bolling, Trump said the Indonesian leader had requested the meeting with the Trump family business in mind. As Mediaite noted, the younger Trump offered this explanation after touting two properties his family has in Indonesia:
We have the other one in Bali. We’re building a great hotel, and that’s going to start very soon. And I never met the president, and I used to go over there quite a bit. And obviously we manage teams over there, and it’s pretty amazing that he knew who I was. And, you know, it’s obviously — I don’t get involved in politics in Indonesia — but when I heard that, I started laughing. ‘Can I please meet Eric?’ He must know the projects very well. And so, you know, we’re very proud of what we did in Indonesia. We’ve been there for, you know, well over a decade. And so, you know, I’m sure he hears about our great success.
In a separate interview with CNN on Thursday, the younger Trump again touted the real estate projects and suggested the Indonesian leader tried to make inroads with the Trump family business in mind through his father, saying he’s “honored that the president knows about it and clearly asks about it because they’re probably two of the most consequential real estate projects in the region.”
“The Trump Organization has two of the largest and most substantial projects in all of Indonesia, which began in 2015, long before President Trump entered office for the first term,” the Trump Organization told ABC News in a statement. Reuters reported that the Indonesian foreign minister said he “did not know what [Subianto] spoke to Trump about” and that “the two leaders shared a close relationship and could have discussed issues outside of state affairs.” Confronted with such a blatant example of self-dealing, you might expect some outrage from the conservatives who spent years accusing President Joe Biden, without evidence, of leading a criminal enterprise to line his family’s pockets. Republicans like Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and James Comer of Kentucky were fixtures on the conservative media circuit, routinely peddling allegations about the “Biden crime family” and its purportedly elaborate web of government grifters. And now here we have audiovisual evidence of the United States’ criminally convicted president setting up a potential meeting between a foreign leader and his son — and said son now suggests the foreign leader wants a meeting because of his interest in the Trump family business. (The White House has previously asserted that the president is not playing a role in the family’s business and his assets are being held in a trust.) But I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath waiting on Republicans to fire up the outrage over this development.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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