Donald Trump describes "EGYPTIAN" dictactor who killed 800 people a day as a "Fanstaic guy,he took control of Egypt"

On Tuesday, Donald Trump met with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Thursday night, he called in to Lou Dobbs’s show on Fox Business to report on how the meeting went.

What he said was embarrassingly ignorant. Trump seemed to praise Sisi’s seizure of power in a military coup, then described Sisi’s counterterrorism campaign as a success when it’s actually a crushing human rights failure.

Perhaps more fundamentally, though, Trump’s comments are deeply revealing about his worldview. The praise he offers Sisi fits with a decades-old pattern of praise for authoritarian leaders — a history of Trump fetishizing a leader’s appearance of “strength” over basic democratic values. It’s a pretty disturbing quality to see in a potential president of the world’s leading democracy.

The first thing Trump said about Sisi — “he’s a fantastic guy, he took control of Egypt” — is almost comically on the nose. As BuzzFeed’s Hayes Brown notes, Sisi quite literally took control of Egypt.

In 2013, Sisi, who was the head of Egypt’s military at the time, headed up a military junta that overthrew the democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi, returning the country to the dictatorship that Arab Spring protesters had toppled just two years prior.

When demonstrators — led by Morsi’s backers, the Muslim Brotherhood — convened in Cairo’s Rabaa al-Adawiya Square to protest, Sisi’s troops gunned them down. Sisi killed 813 protesters in a single day, and has since jailed at least 40,000 people in a crackdown on the Brotherhood and other political dissenters.

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