Donald Trump on Turkey and the Kurds

The letter, first obtained by Fox Business’s Trish Regan on Wednesday and which I confirmed shortly afterward, goes against every tenet of decorum and presidential communication. It’s brash, nasty, and lacking any diplomatic tact whatsoever.

“Having helped draft a few presidential letters to foreign leaders, I want you to know that this is not what they normally look like,” Kelly Magsamen, a former official who worked under both the Bush and Obama administrations at the State Department, Pentagon, and National Security Council, tweeted about the letter.



It also shows that Trump has personally tried to mediate the conflict in Syria that he himself kick-started by withdrawing troops last week, even though on Wednesday he told reporters that the conflict “has nothing to do with us.”

“I view the situation on the Turkish border with Syria to be, for the United States, strategically brilliant,” the president said in the Oval Office.

Trump has said or done something certifiably insane nearly every day of his presidency. And not like, “This guy’s a little kooky”-level insane, but full-on “Mr. President, put down the stapler and unhand the president of Finland”-level insane. But last week, apparently seeking to prove to the world that we ain’t seen nothing yet re: the depths of his mental instability, he wrote and reportedly proudly distributed the following letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for all the world to see:



Each line of the letter contains an obvious Trumpism—talk of “deals,” reference to “tough guys”—but packaged together, in all its batshit glory, in an official letter to another world leader, it seemed unbelievable even for a guy who most people agree should’ve been placed under conservatorship some time ago.



The immediate reaction from the media was “HOW IS THIS THING REAL,” and yet, according to the White House, it totally is! That means that the president of the United States sat down and either penned—or more likely dictated—a letter in which he told the president of Turkey, “Don’t be a tough guy,” “Don’t be a fool,” history “will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don’t happen,” and then, in what might be the absolute craziest way to end a piece of correspondence that references “slaughtering thousands of people,” signed off with: “I will call you later.”