Expect The Donald in Omm El Donia “very soon”: US President Donald Trump met one-on-one with President Abdel Fattah El Sisi yesterday. According to The Associated Press, the meeting with El Sisi “underscored the kinship, with Trump saluting his counterpart on the April release of Egyptian-American charity worker Aya Hijazi.” Following an invitation by El Sisi, Trump said, “I will get to Egypt. We will absolutely be putting that on the list very soon.” Trump also said he was having “very, very important talks” with El Sisi, adding that they have “really been through a lot together positively” and that “safety seems to be very strong” in Egypt. El Sisi said Trump is a “unique personality that is capable of doing the impossible.” Trump praised El Sisi’s fashion choices, according to Politico and the New York Post, which quote him as telling El Sisi “Love your shoes. Boy, those shoes. Man.” Xinhua says the trip is planned to mend soured ties under Obama.

Besides El Sisi, Trump had also held individual meetings with several heads of statesbefore participating in a roundtable with the Gulf Cooperation Council and joining Saudi King Salman in opening Riyadh’s new anti-terrorism center. Trump and the leaders of the GCC states signed “an agreement to crack down on terror financing, including the prosecution of individuals who continue sending money to militants,” The Washington Post says. The agreement is the “farthest reaching commitment to not finance terrorist organizations … The unique piece of it is that every single one of them are signatories on how they’re responsible and will actually prosecute the financing of terrorism, including individuals,” Trump’s deputy national security advisor Dina Powell says.

Al Azhar Grand Imam Sheikh Ahmed El Tayeb also attended the summit, where he delivered a speech on fighting terrorism at the Twitter Forum, from where he reportedly left right before the Donald’s speech, Al Shorouk says.

During his speech yesterday, the US president spoke mostly of the need to militantlyunite to “drive out” the terrorists, Reuters says. “The US president did not use his signature term ‘radical Islamic terrorism’ in the speech, a signal that he heeded advice to employ a more moderate tone in the region,” notes the newswire. Trump did, however, point to Iran as the mutual enemy and a “key source of funding and support for militant groups,” prompting a fiery reaction from Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif on Twitter, who said Trump was “milking KSA of USD 480 bn.”

The western press seems to think that the speech “could have been worse,” given Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric during the elections and the fact that he tried to bar Muslims from entry into the US. Still, however, for a speech that was meant to be about Islam, “Trump did not say anything significant about Islam as a religion or civilization,” Mustafa Akyol writes in a reaction piece for the NYT. Instead, it focuses on the need to fight terrorism and Iran. “The main non-Sunni power, Iran, was bashed by both the American President and his Sunni hosts. This is not going to help anything other than adding to the sectarian divide,” he adds, noting that it is strange since “most radical Islamist terrorists in the region are Sunni, not Shiite” and that the speech was mainly geared towards Trump supporters on and off US soil.

The Egyptian press’ coverage of the Donald’s speech was mostly carried over from thewestern press last night, but we’ll be on the lookout for columnists’ reactions over the next few days.