Faced with mounting bipartisan criticism for his snap announcement supporting Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s invasion of northern Syria, including from Republican lapdog Lindsey Graham, Donald Trump evidently felt the need to explain why he had decided to change the course of U.S. foreign policy, abandoning long-standing Kurdish allies and potentially emboldening ISIS. Naturally, his outlet of choice was Twitter, where he first explained his distaste for “Endless Wars, many of them tribal,” and his desire to “FIGHT WHERE IT IS TO OUR BENEFIT, AND ONLY FIGHT TO WIN.” This, however, did not sit well with Republicans, who blasted him for being an unreliable ally, while the Fox & Friends crew expressed their horror at his decision. “Turkey is not going to fight ISIS!” said host Brian Kilmeade. “And wipe out the Kurds? Are you kidding me?! Again, we are abandoning our most loyal allies who did all our fight[ing]. All we did was arm them, and they did all the work.”

Backed into a corner, Trump simply doubled down. “As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!),” he tweeted Monday, demanding that Turkey and Europe take control of monitoring ISIS, before throwing in a boast: “THE USA IS GREAT!”

It was a typical Trump missive, albeit with new levels of grandiosity, not to mention a wildly far-fetched threat. (It was unclear when, or if, he had previously destroyed and/or obliterated the Turkish economy.) Nor did it have the intended effect. “No matter what President Trump is saying about his decision, it is EXACTLY what President Obama did in Iraq with even more disastrous consequences for our national security,” Graham tweeted well after the president’s attempts at reassurance. “Unlike President Obama, I hope President Trump will reassess and take sound military advice.”

Trump has toyed before with scaling back the number of American troops in Syria, and has been met with dissent, including from former Defense secretary James Mattis, who stepped down after clashing with the president on the issue. Likewise, his decision on Monday incensed the majority of hawks. “This is allies in our area, and future allies saying, ‘Would it pay off to ever stay with America when we do this?’” Kilmeade said on Outnumbered, adding that the U.S. was not only abandoning the Kurds, but opening a vacuum for Russia and ISIS to control the area. He further added that he wasn’t surprised that military officials were stunned, “because they never thought something so ill-advised would be done by a president who has so much respect among military men and women.” Senator Mitch McConnell, too, made his feelings known. “A precipitous withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria would only benefit Russia, Iran, and the Assad regime,” the man who would oversee Trump’s potential impeachment trial said in a statement, urging the president to exercise “American leadership.”

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