Trump sees himself as a winner and despises losers. Whereas he may once have seen Erdoğan as a strongman, it is now clear that the would-be sultan wears no clothes.
Two million Turks have gathered in Istanbul to protest President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his main rival, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on trumped-up corruption and terror charges.
Turks are not stupid; they see through Erdoğan’s cynicism and comment on its ironies: Erdoğan accuses İmamoğlu of corruption, but Erdoğan not only has pending corruption cases dating to his own tenure as mayor, but he has since accumulated billions of dollars in unexplained wealth.
He accuses İmamoğlu of supporting terror, but Turkish journalists photographed Erdoğan’s intelligence service transporting weaponry to an Al Qaeda affiliate in Turkey.