Washington praises Cairo’s permanent listing on X, and issues nothing of its own

Massad Boulos, US Senior Adviser for Arab and African Affairs, commended Egypt on Saturday 14 November for permanently designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist entity. JNS reports he praised the permanent designation, said freezing assets and cutting off financing “deny terrorists the resources they need,” and that the United States stands with Egypt “confronting Muslim Brotherhood violence and destabilization.” The artefact is a post on X by a named official, quoted in the same wording by Ahram Online, Egypt Today, TVC News and the Egyptian Gazette. No State Department or Treasury release accompanied it in anything retrieved. The pattern is not new: Boulos publicly welcomed the European Parliament’s entryism resolution within days of the Strasbourg vote in October. A White House adviser amplifying other jurisdictions' measures, rather than announcing American ones, is itself the week’s Washington story.

The presidential remark came on 12 November, in a phone interview with the Hugh Hewitt Show on Salem News Channel. Hewitt put it to Trump: “We have two enemies, Mr. President. We’ve got communists, and we’ve got the Muslim Brotherhood.” Trump replied: “I think right now, the Muslim Brotherhood might be more dangerous.” The National reports he also said the movement had to be “neutralised.” Middle East Online argued on 13 November that the remark points to a widening of the campaign into the movement’s European networks. That is inference. There is currently no US designation of any European Brotherhood affiliate, and no Federal Register notice covering one.

The instruments that do exist are older. Executive Order 14362 of 24 November 2025 began the process of designating certain chapters, published in the Federal Register at Vol. 90, No. 227, p. 55033. On 13 January 2026 the State Department, under Secretary Marco Rubio, called the first designations “a first step,” naming the Lebanese Muslim Brotherhood — al-Jamaa al-Islamiyah, per Al-Monitor — as an FTO and SDGT alongside its secretary general Muhammad Fawzi Taqqosh. Mada Masr reports the Egyptian, Jordanian and Lebanese branches were designated. The Middle East Forum, an advocacy organisation with a declared position on the group, says a Sudanese branch followed in March 2026; that rests on a single source. In late July, OFAC designated four individuals and three entities for material support to Hamas, among them Mahmoud al-Abyari, described by Kurdistan24 as a UK-based senior figure in the Egyptian Brotherhood.

Assessment: Approval is cheap and reversible; a Federal Register notice is not. Boulos’s language on asset freezes described what Cairo had done, not what Washington would do, and the distinction is the whole story. Treat the chapter count with care: three designations are confirmed against State and Treasury material, a fourth rests on an advocacy outlet, and The National’s own copy says three. Note too that the sharpest American moves against the movement this year have run through a state governor and the federal courts rather than through new federal instruments. Until an OFAC entry names one of the three Egyptians listed last Sunday, the endorsement is rhetoric.