Trump asked for his 'favorite dictator' while awaiting for Egyptian president at G7
US President Donald Trump referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi as his “favorite dictator” while awaiting a meeting with him at a gathering during the Group of Seven (G7) summit in France last month, a report says.
Trump was heard jokingly asking “where is my favorite dictator” in a voice loud enough to be heard by a group of US and Egyptian officials at a meeting in Biarritz, western France, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
Citing several witnesses, the Journal said, Trump’s question was met with a shocked silence.
Among the officials who were present in the room, were US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former national security adviser John Bolton, Egypt's foreign affairs minister and chief of Egypt's General Intelligence Service, according to the Journal.
The report did not clarify whether the Egyptian president himself heard the remarks.
Sisi has long been facing international condemnation for a crackdown on civil society groups since he took power in 2014, a year after a military coup spearheaded by him toppled the country’s first-ever democratically-elected president Mohamed Morsi.
After his ouster, Morsi began serving a 20-year prison term on charges of ordering the arrest and torture of protesters, a 25-year jail term on charges of passing intelligence to Qatar, and a three-year term for insulting the judiciary.
The 67-year-old passed away during a trial court session in the capital, Cairo back in June.
Sisi's human rights record, however, has not stopped Trump from expressing his support for his government.
"We understood each other very well. He's a very tough man, I will tell you that," Trump said during the G7 summit.
This is while; almost two dozen human rights organizations called on French President Emmanuel Macron to speak out against human rights abuses in Egypt as Sisi was attending the summit in Biarritz.
They urged the French president to call on Sisi to "drop all charges and unconditionally release all arbitrarily detained human rights defenders and journalists, and drop abusive probation measures against them.”
Macron had criticized Egypt's human rights record back in January, saying that "things have got worse since October 2017" when Sisi visited Paris.
It was, however, not known if Macron addressed the human rights situation in Egypt with Sisi during the summit last month.
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