From modern downtown bookstores to dusty street-corner bookstands where venders peddle Xeroxed copies of international best-sellers, one new release has proved popular this winter in Cairo: translated copies of Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” Ahmed, a thirty-one-year-old bookseller in Tahrir Square, the epicenter of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, told me that Egyptian readers found the bluntness of America’s new President entertaining. “Trump is funny,” Ahmed said, declining to give his last name. “He says what he thinks.”
For Egypt’s democracy and human-rights activists, Trump is something far different: an enabler of repression who has embraced Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as he carries out the most repressive crackdown in the country in decades. Three days after taking office, Trump phoned Sisi and effusively pledged his support for the authoritarian ruler. When Sisi visited Washington last spring, Trump warmly welcomed him to the White House, reversing an Obama Administration policy of declining to meet the former general because of his government’s sweeping human-rights abuses.
Five years ago, Sisi seized power and jailed the country’s democratically elected President in a popularly backed military coup that led to the massacre of thousands of supporters of the now banned Muslim Brotherhood. Under Sisi, the government has arrested at least sixty thousand people, handed down hundreds of preliminary death sentences, and tried thousands of civilians in military courts, according to human-rights groups. Torture, including beatings, electric shocks, stress positions, and sometimes rape, has been systematically employed. After a pair of church bombings by the Islamic State killed forty-seven people last April, Sisi declared a nationwide state of emergency that gave the government sweeping powers to arrest people, seize assets, and censor the media.
Trump has made no mention of the repression, called Sisi a “fantastic guy,” and even complimented the Egyptian leader on his shoes. Sisi, in turn, has praised Trump for being “a unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” Trump’s embrace of Sisi is not unusual: he has praised authoritarian leaders around the world, but his backing of autocratic regimes is perhaps nowhere more visible than in Egypt.
This week, Egyptians went to the polls in a three-day Presidential election that observers described as a farce. Sisi ran against one obscure opponent, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, who is a Sisi supporter himself. Three former high-ranking military leaders who had announced that they would challenge Sisi were arrested or forced out of the race. The President then proclaimed his disappointment that other “distinguished people” were not challenging him. “We are not ready, isn’t it a shame,” Sisi said on national television.
On Thursday, state media announced preliminary results showing that ninety-two per cent of Egyptians had voted for Sisi’s reëlection. Low turnout, estimated to be at around forty per cent, fuelled speculation about the breadth of popular support for Sisi, who has centralized power in a small circle of generals and security chiefs. “Over the three days of voting, the regime struggled to drum up sufficient interest in voting for a variety of reasons,” Elissa Miller, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council, wrote on Wednesday. “Among them is the reality that Sisi has failed to deliver on a number of promises made over the last four years of his presidency.”
Trump Administration officials, meanwhile, praised the vote. The American Embassy in Cairo tweeted, on Monday, “as Americans we are very impressed by the enthusiasm and patriotism of Egyptian voters.”
In interviews in Cairo earlier this month, Egyptian human-rights activists were withering in their criticism of Trump. “Trump is idiotic,” Ahmed Maher, one of the leaders of the 2011 uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak, told me. Last year Maher was released from jail, where he spent three years in solitary confinement after being convicted of illegally protesting. Maher’s release from prison was only partial. For the next two years, Maher must sleep in a local police-station jail cell each night, from 6 P.M. to 6 A.M. “This time is more difficult than Mubarak’s,” he told me. “I cannot say if [things in Egypt] will be worse or better, but I don’t think it will be better.”
Mahinour El-Masry, a human-rights lawyer who was released from prison in January, after serving two months after also being convicted of illegally protesting, called Trump “a total lunatic” who is “making it worse for the whole world.” “Sisi will never stop,” she added, “especially with someone like Trump in power.”
In an effort to further muzzle dissent, Sisi’s government recently co-opted Trump’s tactic of declaring critical coverage “fake news” but added an additional element. Earlier this month, the Egyptian public prosecutor announced telephone hotlines for citizens to report “news relying on lies and rumor.” The crackdown has intensified: about five hundred media and N.G.O. Web sites were blocked ahead of the vote, which the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized. Egypt’s Foreign Ministry called the reports of shutdowns “baseless allegations.”
At the same time, Sisi is strongly supported by the country’s military, its economic élite, and many average Egyptians who view the Tahrir uprising and subsequent one-year rule of the Muslim Brotherhood as disastrous. Abdel Moneim Said, the former chairman of Al-Ahram, the most widely circulated daily paper in Egypt, and now the chairman of the Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper, told me that Sisi was the country’s best leader to fight terrorism. He dismissed complaints of Sisi being more oppressive than Mubarak as “nonsense,” and said critics fail to consider the dangers posed by the Islamic State and other militants. Two days before the election, a bomb attack by an unknown group targeted a top security official in the coastal city of Alexandria. The following day, Egyptian police killed six militants in a raid. “Look, we should stand with the military,” Said told me. “We are in a war.”
Democracy activists say Sisi is using fears of the Islamic State to stifle dissent in Egypt. “He’s convinced the people that it’s a two-party game match,” El-Masry told me. “So if we say we’re against Sisi, the people think we’re with terrorism.” Steven Cook, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, told me that both Trump and Sisi use the threat of terrorism to wield power and muzzle dissent. “Trump has given Sisi a free pass,” said Cook. “It’s a perfect storm of Trumpian psychodrama.”
Maher, the democracy activist, said that Trump’s recent appointment of John Bolton, a vocal supporter of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, will only feed popular support for militant groups who say that the United States is trying to oppress Muslims. “It will all just make the world more crazy and stupid,” Maher told me, as he walked into his neighborhood police station for his nightly imprisonment.
