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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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Shortly after speaking to Turkey’s authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Sunday, Trump endorsed “a Turkish military operation that would sweep away American-backed Kurdish forces near the border in Syria.” In defiance of the will of the Pentagon, State Department, and both houses of Congress, the president agreed to suddenly withdraw U.S. troops from northeast Syria, leaving our nation’s Kurdish allies defenseless against an invading army that considers them “terrorists” on the basis of little more than their ethnicity.
In the days since, the White House’s position has grown more ambiguous. On Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted his support of both the Turkish government and the Kurds — complimenting the former for the grace it displayed in releasing an American pastor it had baselessly imprisoned.
Regardless, Trump’s initial, renegade policy raises questions about whether unsavory personal motives are influencing some of the most consequential decisions his office empowers him to make. The basis of this suspicion is simple: Donald Trump has a significant conflict of interest in his dealings with Turkey.
But don’t take my word for it, take Trump’s.
“I have a little conflict of interest ‘cause I have a major, major building in Istanbul,” Trump told Steve Bannon during a December 2015 interview on Breitbart’s radio show. “It’s a tremendously successful job. It’s called Trump Towers — two towers, instead of one, not the usual one, it’s two.”
Critically, Trump does not actually own these towers. Rather, he licenses his brand to the building’s owner, Turkish tycoon Aydin Dogan, an ally of Erdogan. This arrangement may actually leave our president more vulnerable to extortion from the Turkish regime than if he owned the towers outright. According to Trump’s financial disclosures, he has collected between $3.2 million and $17 million in royalties from the licensing deal since 2012. This means that Trump could ostensibly lose millions of dollars, should Dogan terminate their partnership. Which is to say: The president could have a multimillion-dollar motivation to avoid pursuing any policy that might incur Dogan’s wrath. Notably, the prospect that Dogan might leverage his business relationship with Trump to influence his policies isn’t a mere hypothetical. As Russ Choma of Mother Jones explains:
In June 2016, after Trump said he supported a ban on immigration by people from countries he said were associated with Islamic terrorism — he called them “terror countries” — Erdogan objected, and so did Dogan, and both threatened to remove Trump’s name from the buildings.
… Less than a month after the threat to remove his name was made, Trump very publicly https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/07/21/donald-trump-says-u-s-shouldnt-criticize-turkeys-erdogan-over-post-coup-purge/ (voiced support) for Erdogan when the Turkish leader faced a coup attempt. And his closeness with Erdogan has continued, even over the objections of some of Trump’s most reliable supporters. For instance, in May 2017, when Erdogan visited Washington, D.C., for a White House visit, Turkish agents violently attacked protesters outside the Turkish ambassador’s residence — shoving past local police officers to do so. Video showed Erdogan calmly watching the attack from his car. Although the House of Representatives, then under GOP control, voted 397-0 to condemn the attacks, Trump refused to do so. A few months later, Trump praised Erdogan, describing him as “a very good friend” and saying he gets “very high marks” for the way he runs Turkey.
“The main problem in any democracy is that crowd-pleasers are generally brainless swine who can go out on a stage & whup their supporters into an orgiastic frenzy—then go back to the office & sell every one of the poor bastards down the tube for a nickel apiece.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
― Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72
WASHINGTON — American commandos were working alongside Kurdish forces at an outpost in eastern Syria last year when they were attacked by columns of Syrian government tanks and hundreds of troops, including Russian mercenaries. In the next hours, the Americans threw the Pentagon’s arsenal at them, including B-52 strategic bombers. The attack was stopped.
That operation, in the middle of the American-led campaign against the Islamic State in Syria, showed the extent to which the United States military was willing to protect the Syrian Kurds, its main ally on the ground.
But now, with the White House revoking protection for these Kurdish fighters, some of the Special Forces officers who battled alongside the Kurds say they feel deep remorse at orders to abandon their allies.
“They trusted us and we broke that trust,” one Army officer who has worked alongside the Kurds in northern Syria said last week in a telephone interview. “It’s a stain on the American conscience.”
“I’m ashamed,” said another officer who had also served in northern Syria. Both officers spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid reprisals from their chains of command.
And the response from the Kurds themselves was just as stark. “The worst thing in military logic and comrades in the trench is betrayal,” said Shervan Darwish, an official allied with the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces.
The next flurry of orders from Washington, some fear, could pull American troops out of Syria altogether. Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper said on Sunday that roughly 1,000 American troops in northeastern Syria would conduct a “deliberate withdrawal,” at least farther south — and possibly out of the country entirely in the coming days and weeks.
