Erdogan says he taught his foremost Republican Congressional critic Lindsey Graham “a lesson” during yesterday’s closed door meeting hosted by Trump in the Oval, which involved the somewhat unprecedented scene of five Republican senators and Turkey’s president squaring off.
Things “took a dark turn” when Erdogan upended the meeting by whipping out his iPad, in a ‘let me show you something on my tablet’ moment, or just about the most boomer thing ever.
As Axios reports: “An Oval Office meeting yesterday with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took a dark turn when Erdoğan pulled out his iPad and made the group watch a propaganda video that depicted the leader of the primarily-Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces as a terrorist, according to three sources familiar with the meeting.”
Predictably Graham and others found it entirely unpersuasive, after “Erdoğan apparently thought he could sway these senators by forcing them to watch a clunky propaganda film.”
At the end of the short film, Graham turned to Turkey’s leader and said, “Well, do you want me to go get the Kurds to make one about what you’ve done?”
This seems to be about the only moment the Turkish dictator received any significant direct push back on his ‘Operation Peace Spring’ in an overall pathetic and pointless daylong visit to the White House.
I watched the full Trump-Erdogan presser, which included an outrageous moment where Trump announced that only Turkish-friendly reporters would be allowed to ask Erdogan questions. Of course the whole thing turned into an unopposed anti-Kurdish rant, a favorite past time of top Turkish leaders across the board.
After President Trump urges Erdogan to call on “a friendly reporter from Turkey”, Lindsey Graham turns to me and says, “There aren’t any others left.” pic.twitter.com/VgEpYyr2PR
— Jonathan Karl (@jonkarl) November 13, 2019
Meanwhile, it must be remembered that NATO’s second largest military maintains an unabashed policy of pursuing ‘demographic correction’ – as they call it – in northern Syria. In other words, ethnic cleansing, yet apparently this subject shall not be broached in the White House press room.
