WEST PALM BEACH, FLA.—Friday seemed to be U.S. President Donald Trump’s day off. But on Twitter at least, it became a whirlwind.

He began the morning offering renewed disgust over the “hemorrhaging” NFL and players kneeling during the national anthem. He seized the chance to golf — “quickly,” he noted — with an entourage of the sport’s greats. And as daylight faded behind the West Palm Beach skyline, Trump weighed in on what has become a favourite grievance: the possibility that he might not be selected as Time magazine’s person of the year.

“Time Magazine called to say that I was PROBABLY going to be named ‘Man (Person) of the Year,’ like last year, but I would have to agree to an interview and a major photo shoot,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “I said probably is no good and took a pass. Thanks anyway!”

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The magazine bestowed the title on Trump last year, establishing him as the “person who had the greatest influence, for better or worse,” on the events of 2016. It was, Trump said on Twitter, “a great honor.”

But his latest jab continued a complicated history with the magazine. In 2011, he said Time had “lost all credibility” for not naming him to its Top 100, and in 2015, he complained that he was passed over in favour of Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany despite being “the big favorite.”

Yet he appeared to aspire to be on the magazine’s cover, with a fake 2009 cover story once hanging near the entrance of Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate where he is spending his vacation, and in many of his other golf clubs, according to a Washington Post article in June. (A White House spokesperson declined at the time to say whether Trump had known that the cover wasn’t real.)

At the time of Trump’s tweet Friday, an online readers poll on whom the magazine should select showed Trump in a three-way tie for second and trailing Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who had 21 per cent of the vote. The recipient of the title, who is ultimately decided by Time’s editors, will be announced Dec. 6.

A spokesperson for the magazine directed reporters back to Twitter.

In between his bookends of institutional critique, the president fit in a few moments of international productivity Friday.

In an early-morning phone call with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, Trump discussed the sale of U.S. military equipment, the Syrian refugee crisis and “pending adjustments to the military support provided to our partners on the ground in Syria,” according to a summary provided by the White House.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry later said the pending adjustments meant that the United States would no longer provide weapons to the YPG, a Kurdish militia fighting in Syria against the Islamic State — a plan Trump had previously approved, according to reports from Turkish news media.

Trump’s decision to stop supplying the Syrian Kurds could ease tensions with Erdogan that have been aggravated by a number of issues, chief among them the Trump administration’s reluctance to turn over a Turkish cleric, Fethullah Gulen, who lives in exile in Pennsylvania and whom Erdogan accuses of fomenting a failed coup against him in 2016. The Turkish government is also angry over the case of an Iranian-Turkish businessman, Reza Zarrab, who is fighting federal charges in the United States that he evaded Iranian sanctions.

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The United States began working closely with the Syrian Kurds during the Obama administration and continued under Trump. Some critics said Friday that the decision to stop supplying them amounted to a betrayal, since U.S. forces had relied on the Kurds, and their fighting skills, to retake the Syrian town of Raqqa from Daesh, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

Trump also called President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi of Egypt to offer sympathy and support in the aftermath of the militant attack on a Sufi mosque there Friday that killed at least 235 people.

But for the majority of the day, the president indulged in his favourite moments of relaxation: spending hours on his lush golf course in Jupiter, Florida, accompanied by professional golfers Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson, staying mostly out of sight of the news media and sharing his commentary with his millions of Twitter followers. It appeared to be, as noted by the golfers and visitors who shared pictures of him on social media, a good day.

“Great spirits,” Eric Kaplan, a club member, observed on Twitter. “That is one gracious man.”

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