Donald Trump demands loyalty, which he defines as total agreement, from those around him. Yet, he apparently does not understand what real loyalty means. That would be defending our allies. Instead, he threw open wide the White House doors to all dictators.
POTUS honored the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan by granting him a meeting in the Oval Office along with a group of the president’s loyal men and women senators. Just a month ago, Erdogan attacked our virtually-disarmed important Kurdish allies. The Turkish leader has long been committed to their annihilation. Why would any American president do this?
In a twisted Kabuki theater of corrupt politics, Trump fawned over Erdogan. He said according to CBS News:
‘I want to thank the president for the job they’ve done, again, this has been thousands of years in the process between borders, between these countries and other countries that we’re involved with 7,000 miles away. So, we want to worry about our things.’
The U.S. president claimed he was “too busy” to watch his impeachment hearings. Instead, he continued to berate the Democrats in the Oval Office to a foreign head of state. He called the hearing “a witch hunt” and a “hoax.”
Trump said he had not been briefed. Then, he accused the Democrats of using “television lawyers” to conduct their questioning. That would be funny if his attachment to his television attorney Rudy Giuliani was not so damning:
‘I’m too busy to watch it. It’s a witch hunt, it’s a hoax, I’m too busy to watch it. So, I’m sure I’ll get a report.’
POTUS continued:
‘There’s nothing — I have not been briefed. There’s nothing there. I see they’re using lawyers that are television lawyers, they took some guys off television. You know. I’m not surprised to see it, because [House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam] Schiff can’t do his own questions.’
The U.S president told the press that he and Erdogan were “very good friends” almost from “day one.” After one disastrous phone call to Erdogan, he rolled back American troops in northern Syria and let the Russians roll in and fly their flag over our former bases.
Instead, this president has had an unusual affinity for the strong-arm men, the authoritarians, the dictators. His top aide Stephen Miller has sent emails espousing Adolph Hitler’s Mein Kompf.
House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Eliot Engel (D-NY) and other Democratic legislators sent Trump a letter last week that read in part:
‘President Erdogan’s decision to invade northern Syria on October 9 has had disastrous consequences for U.S. national security, has led to deep divisions in the NATO alliance, and caused a humanitarian crisis on the ground. Turkish forces have killed civilians and members of the Syrian Democratic Forces, a critical U.S. partner in the fight against ISIS, and displaced over one hundred thousand people from their homes in northern Syria.;
Without any evidence from U.S. intelligence, Trump claimed that many of the Turkish citizens were being killed:
‘[I]n the area that we’re talking about [and it’s] not a one-way street.’
The legislators who attended Trump’s meeting were: Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Tim Scott (R-SC), Ted Cruz (R-TX), Joni Ernst (R-IA), and Jim Risch (R-ID).
‘The purpose of this meeting is to have an American civics lesson with our Turkish friends. And there’s a pony in there somewhere if we can find it.’
Both Graham and Ernst have a military background, so it was surprising to hear they willingly participated in a meeting with a dictator. Erdogan was committed to genocide of the Kurds, who lost 11,000 of their fiercest warriors fighting side-by-side with the U.S. military.
Erdogan threatened to buy his country’s weaponry from Russia rather than the U.S. Trump claimed that the group would be going over the “Russian S-400 missile defense system’ Erdogan already purchased along with the F-35 fighter jet program.
Erdogan decided to buy the S-400, a potential threat to F-35 planes, planes incompatible with NATO systems, the U.S. kicked them out of the F-35 fighter jet program this summer. It might be possible that the U.S. would sanction Turkey for buying Russian weapons.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
The Mueller Report Adventures: In Bite-Sizes on this Facebook page. These quick, two-minute reads interpret the report in normal English for busy people. Mueller Bite-Sizes uncovers what is essentially a compelling spy mystery. Interestingly enough, Mueller Bite-Sizes can be read in any order.
