On September 5, Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev had a phone call with U.S. President Donald Trump. But over the weekend, it was a shouted question from a Kazakh reporter as Trump departed the White House, and the headlines it sparked, that drew attention.
“Mr. President, what do you think about Kazakhstan? Are you going to visit a Central Asia country?” a correspondent from 24KZ shouted over the drone of Marine One, which was waiting on the White House lawn to whisk Trump out of Washington, D.C. to attend the men’s final of the U.S. Open tennis tournament on September 7.
Trump paused at the line of reporters and replied, “I may. I had a great conversation with him. Say hello to him. He’s a good man.”
Headlines ran off with the exchange. Reuters reported, “Trump says he had a good conversation with Kazak President Tokayev.” TengriNews highlighted that “Trump called Tokayev a good man.” Other outlets completely misquoted the exchange, transforming “great” into “excellent” and “I may” into “I can do that.” (Meanwhile, a thousand American grandmothers groaned about the conflation of may and can.)
A source at Kazakhstan’s Foreign Ministry, in response to an inquiry from The Diplomat, said that there was no recent call.
Tokayev spoke to President-elect Trump in December 2024, but since then “there were no other high-level contacts,” the source said. “There must have been a mistake in what the media is now writing.”
The signs were clear before The Diplomat received that confirmation that no such call had taken place. Trump, in the exchange with the Kazakh reporter, didn’t mention Tokayev by name, nor Kazakhstan.
And the Kazakh presidential website, Akorda.kz, made no mention of a call with Trump. There’s a September 8 press release about a telegram sent to President Gordana Siljanovska-Davkova of North Macedonia congratulating the state on its independence anniversary, and one from September 7 about a telegram sent to Brazil’s president congratulating him on that country’s independence day. There’s a release regarding Tokayev’s September 5 meeting with the akim of Astana, about a ceremony the same day congratulating oil and gas workers, and a September 4 telegram thanking Chinese President Xi Jinping for his hospitality and warm welcome during Tokayev’s recent visit to China.
Akorda typically publishes press releases about phone calls between Tokayev and other heads of state. For example, on August 23, Tokayev spoke with French President Emmanuel Macron. On August 17, he had a phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin. On August 11 he spoke with Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, a day after speaking to Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. The day before that, on August 10, he spoke with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
It was extraordinarily odd that there was no press release about the supposed call between Tokayev and Trump. That should have been a first clue to media, which breathlessly publicized a call that never happened.
As Uzbekistan’s fervor to share the momentous event of its president’s actual call with Trump demonstrates, it’s a big deal. The Diplomat received no less than three emails from Uzbek government sources over the span of a single day sharing the details of the recent call.
No U.S. president has ever traveled to Central Asia while in office, and Central Asian presidents are rarely afforded visits to the White House.
Tokayev has never, as president, traveled to Washington. In 2019, 2022, and 2023 he traveled to New York on working visits to attend and speak at the U.N. General Assembly. In 2023, Tokayev, and the other four Central Asian presidents, met with then-U.S. President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly in the first Central Asia-U.S. Leaders’ Summit.
But Mirziyoyev has scored a coveted White House invitation. In 2018, Mirziyoyev made an official visit to Washington, meeting with Trump at the White House during the latter’s first term. It was the first such visit by an Uzbek president since Islam Karimov in 2002. It’s clear that Tashkent is angling for a repeat, or an upgrade: a Trump visit to Uzbekistan.
Tashkent has good reason to be enthusiastic. Uzbekistan, like every other country in the world, has sought to thread the new needle of U.S. foreign policy. It has done so deftly, highlighting its critical minerals potential and cooperating with the deportation of illegal Uzbek migrants caught up in increased U.S. immigration enforcement. Its trade balance with the U.S. is less concerning to Washington. Of the Central Asian states, only Kazakhstan was hit with tariffs higher than the blanket 10 percent.
In April, Tashkent financed the deportation of 130 illegal Uzbek immigrants; and on September 7 the U.S. Embassy in Tashkent announced the deportation of 39 more. This isn’t new cooperation – over the course of 2024 more than 500 Uzbeks were removed from the United States and returned to Uzbekistan – but highlighting it is new and fits clearly into efforts to please the Trump administration.
Tashkent’s hopes shine through in its readout of the recent Trump-Mirziyoyev call. Per Tashkent, Trump “highly appraised and supported the ongoing irreversible reforms of the past years in New Uzbekistan, aimed at the modernization of economy and increasing welfare of the population.”
Topics discussed included promoting business cooperation and increasing trade volumes. The C5+1 scored a mention, of course, though it is unclear whether there will be a C5+1 president summit on the sidelines of this year’s U.N. General Assembly. There was also mention of the 2026 World Cup, set to take place in the United States. Earlier this summer, Uzbekistan’s national team qualified to complete in the World Cup for the first time.
The Uzbek side invited Trump to pay an official visit to Uzbekistan.
The U.S. side has released no official statements about the call so far.