Earlier this month, Donald Trump sent an insane letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Yesterday, it made its way to the press, where the reaction was presumably not what Trump had expected when he reportedly proudly distributed it to Congress. The letter—likely the first in history from one world leader to another that included the phrases “don’t be a tough guy,” “don’t be a fool,” multiple exclamation points, and the warning that “history...will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen”—was at first assumed to be fake; a good parody of Trump, but not something that the actual U.S. president would ever be allowed to send. But, surprise! It was real. And in addition to not having the intended effect on the media and America—i.e., probably very few people came away from it thinking, Wow, he’s really giving it to this Erdoğan guy—the president of Turkey was apparently unmoved by it as well.
BBC reports that Erdoğan “received the letter, thoroughly rejected it, and put it in the bin.” While it’s unclear if he ripped it in half first, balled it up and threw it in basketball-style, or made a paper airplane out of it, the Turkish president clearly ignored the main request, which was not to launch a military offensive in northern Syria against the Kurds, a move that was widely predicted to happen when Trump pulled out of the region.
On Tuesday, Trump sent Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence to Ankara to clean up the mess he himself made, an effort that thus far appears to be unsuccessful. Turkey rejected a call for an immediate cease-fire, instead pressing ahead in the region, where our Kurdish allies have been slaughtered, ISIS prisoners have escaped, and the U.S. has had to bomb its own base to “reduce usefulness” as militias backed by Turkey have moved in. On Thursday, Pompeo and Pence are scheduled to meet with Erdoğan after Erdoğan initially refused to do so.
Meanwhile, with the entire thing continuing to spectacularly blow up in his face, Trump insisted Wednesday that his decision to abandon the Kurds and give the greenlight to Erdoğan to invade Syria—which he says he never did—was “strategically brilliant.” He also claimed the Kurds are “no angels,” floated the baseless theory that they purposely let ISIS prisoners go to make the U.S. “look as bad as possible,” and noted, for reasons that remain unclear, “They’ve got a lot of sand over there...There’s a lot of sand they can play with.”
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