Trump alleged to have donated bounced check to Macri's 2015 campaign in Argentina
When Argentine President Mauricio Macri hosted Trump at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires last week, Trump said he'd "been friends with Mauricio for a long time, many years."
Trump met Mauricio Macri, then 25, while wrangling with his father, a top Argentine contractor and developer, over a contentious Manhattan real estate project in 1984 - one which Macri claimed in later interviews that Trump forced the elder Macri to sell by cajoling New York authorities and local banks to boycott.
They nevertheless, by his own account, later became friends.
The Trump-Macri encounter at the G20 reminded some sources of an unusual conversation between Macri and then-Secretary of State John Kerry in Buenos Aires in August 2016.
According to three sources, those present talked about Trump as a comical sideshow - including Macri, who shared an anecdote from a year earlier:
When Macri was running for president in 2015, he got a phone call out of the blue.
"This is Donald Trump," Macri told the people in the room, impersonating the future president and pretending to hold a phone to his head. "I've been watching you."
The call amazed Macri, he told listeners. "Trump goes on to say, ‘I remember you fondly and I remember the business deal,'" one participant recalled. "And Macri says, 'Fondly? Fondly, you son of a gun?'"
Some days after the call, a big FedEx envelope arrived with a check from Trump to Macri's campaign. One source thought the check was for $500; another thought $5,000.
Then came the punchline: Macri told the room that when his team went to deposit the check, it bounced.
The White House did not comment, and a representative for the Argentine government denied the conversation took place.
While Trump didn't break U.S. law by sending a check to Macri, it's illegal for an Argentine politician to accept a foreign contribution.
The arrangement was, however, not unusual in Argentine politics - particularly Macri's right-wing "Let's Change" coalition, currently under federal investigation for campaign finance violations, money laundering, and identity theft.
Journalist Hugo Alconada Mon alleged in his most recent book that 90% of the $180 million raised by Macri's 2015 campaign went unreported to Argentina's National Electoral Commission.
At: https://www.axios.com/donald-trump-mauricio-macri-argentina-bounced-check-7d535bf5-a890-4b3e-85e6-f9a1aa1522cc.html
"Get me out of here": Trump ignores Argentina's Macri during the recent G-20 Summit in Buenos Aires.
The two, however, share a long personal history dating from Trump's 1984 purchase from the Macris of the failed Lincoln West (now Riverside South) development in Manhattan - as well as a close political affinity.
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