Donald Trump’s decision earlier this month to abandon our Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS and pull out of northern Syria, paving the way for Turkey to invade the region, has backfired and blown up in his face in a record-setting fashion. But because he’s constitutionally incapable of admitting he made a mistake, he’s spent the last week explaining, extremely unconvincingly, that he did not massively f--k up, glaring evidence to the contrary. On Wednesday, that revolved around smearing the Kurdish people, who’ve been slaughtered by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s army. Among other things, the president claimed:

That the Kurds, who, again, helped us defeat ISIS, “are no angels”

That his decision to abandon a highly volatile area, which his own government warned would destabilize the region, was “strategically brilliant”

That he didn’t give Erdoğan “a green light” to invade Syria, even though that‘s exactly what he did

That Syria…has a lot of sand (??)

That the Kurds, like undocumented immigrants, are a bigger terrorist threat than ISIS

That the ISIS prisoners who escaped as a result of Turkey’s invasion were actually purposely released by the Kurds to make him look bad, a claim that, like virtually everything the president has said since January 20, 2017, has no basis in reality.

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