Rachel Maddow questioned President Donald Trump’s hot mic moment in Egypt, stating that the president’s apparent plans to arrange a meeting with his son Eric Trump and Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto re-opens corruption theories surrounding Trump’s 2016 presidential election win.
“Eric Trump has no job in the U.S. government,” Maddow said Monday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.” “There is no reason why an American president should be arranging meetings for one of his family members with the head of state of another country, particularly when he’s at an international meeting on official presidential business.”
The hot mic moment Maddow is referring to was Trump’s chat with Subianto on Monday, during which the president said he’ll have Eric “call” Subianto after Subianto asked to meet him.
“I’ll have Eric call,” Trump reportedly said to Subianto at the time. “Should I do that? He’s such a good boy. I’ll have Eric call.”
Maddow shared that Trump’s remarks are similar to the questionable arrangements he’s made in the past with foreign leaders, particularly during his 2016 run for presidency against Hillary Clinton.
“Just a few weeks before [2016] Election Day, as Donald Trump’s campaign was running out of money and it really looked like he was going to lose to Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, at the height of the 2016 presidential campaign, he took a one-on-one meeting with the president of Egypt,” Maddow explained. “He came out of that meeting and he called the president of Egypt a ‘fantastic guy.’ He promised that if he, Donald Trump, was elected president, the United States would be a ‘loyal friend to Egypt.’”
She went on to explain that years later, and in between chummy gifts to Egypt, a 2024 Washington Post article reported that a $10 million cash withdrawal prompted an investigation into whether Trump took money from Egypt, which Trump appointees at the time labeled as “textbook Fake News.”
As Maddow explained, Trump’s advisers were “begging” Trump at the time to put more money into his campaign but Trump refused to. However, after his meeting with the president of Egypt, Trump changed his tune.
“Somehow shortly thereafter, he changed his mind about how much money he could give to his campaign,” Maddow said. “Suddenly he could give $10 million of his own money to his campaign in the last crucial weeks before the election. He had somehow come up with $10 million that he felt he could afford to give his campaign. Interestingly, at the time, it was little notice, but he said he would give that $10 million as a loan, not as a donation. So that meant he would expect to be paid back that $10 million. Donald Trump at the very last minute supercharges his 2016 campaign with a $10 million loan right at the end. He then does win the election.”
Maddow went on to state that five days before Trump was inaugurated in January 2017, “mysteriously an organization linked to the Egyptian intelligence service, withdrew almost exactly $10 million in cash from the National Bank of Egypt.”
She added: “Now the president, in his official capacity, presumably is hooking up his son, who is running the family business, with the president of Indonesia, the country that is hosting this new Trump family boondoggle in that country.”
