https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1022502465147682817
Turks are up in arms. Maybe we'll have a war with them too. It'll be funny because we supply them the arms and they can use it against our own countrymen. Ah to be killed by your own Made in USA products. Can't get any more patriotic than that. US is also giving them F-35's if I recall.
Hm ... I wonder if Turkey's continued detainment of this guy is to somehow leverage getting their hands on Fethullah Gülen who Erdogan wants BADLY.
Not like that would happen when Gülen was granted asylum and shipping him back to Turkey would mean his most certain torture and death.
From what I read, he's a moderate Muslim living in exile in the US. Ah, that coup attempt back in 2016 where the military tried to bring down the president. Didn't they do this more than once when the country turned more say Islamic? Kinda makes US look bad to the Turks ally wise when US is protecting him.
shareTurkey is more like a frenemy than an ally. Yes they're part of NATO, but now that democratically elected Erdogan has cowed the press into submission, destroyed the independent judiciary replacing them with his stooges, and co-opted parliament's majority party with his fanatical loyalists he's firmly entrenched himself as an autocrat and tragically concluded 80 years of democratic rule in Turkey (they still have a semi-functional parliament, but whatever) he's actually been more two-faced than a faithful ally over the last decade. He knows he can get away with it because Turkey's NATO membership constrains us from moving too strongly against him. He butted heads with Obama numerous times over his clandestine support of ISIS and our Kurdish alliance. The Kurds have been our most faithful and useful ally in the region stretching back to Iraq and Erdogan hates that. That's because there's a significant Kurdish minority in Turkey fighting for independence that face discrimination and persecution by him and he fears they might establish a Kurdish autonomous region in northern Syria on Turkey's border. Our Kurdish alliance prevents him from crushing the Syrian Kurds. When Trump took office Erdogan lobbied the new prez hard to forsake our alliance with the Kurds, but Trump did the opposite and armed them which proved pivotal to the overthrow of ISIS and the Islamic State.
So who cares what he thinks? But he wanted Gülen so bad that he worked out a secret deal with Mike Flynn (remember him?) where they were going to go straight gangsta and kidnap him on US soil to ship him back to Turkey illegally. Erdogan agreed to pay Mike Flynn 15 mil to help him do the dirty ops job but Flynn got fired as Trump's NSA adviser within weeks of taking office. All was revealed in Wall Street Journal by former CIA director James Woolsey who attended one of the meetings where they were planning kidnapping. He went to the press to cover his ass after learning Flynn had been under surveillance.
T-rump would love to create a war, because he believes that would increase his popularity.
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