You get the feeling now that, with time running out on El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago and his retinue of crooks and mountebanks, all the dark debts he owes to people for their help in getting elected are coming due, the debts to Vladimir Putin and the Volga Bagmen first among them. There was the extortion plot aimed at a newly elected president of Ukraine whose country already was in what is at the very least a warm war with Russia. Now, in a decision announced in the dark of a Sunday night, the administration has decided essentially to green-light a potential slaughter of the Kurdish fighters who did so much to dislodge ISIS in Iraq.

Even accepting that every presidential administration of recent vintage has sold out the Kurds in one way or another, this is a monumental betrayal and without question the single major foreign policy blunder perpetrated by Camp Runamuck in the White House. Here's the official statement, which dropped just as Patrick Mahomes was dropping (again) in Kansas City Sunday night. Here's the official bill of sale for another piece of the American soul.

Trump huddles with his buddy Erdogan at the 2018 NATO Summit in Brussels, Belgium. Sean Gallup Getty Images

So Erdogan, another authoritarian yahoo whom the president* admires, now has our permission to enter northern Syria and do what he will to the two million Kurds who live there. This is cutting and running at its most embarrassingly idiotic. There is no telling what will become of the ISIS prisoners, and there is horrible precedent as to what will happen to the Kurds. They lost some 13,000 fighters winning the victory over ISIS that the president* who will watch them be slaughtered has the audacity to claim as his own. Russia will have a field day in Syria as well.

You will note the customary note of petulance in the White House release, which reads like something an angry high-school junior would write after a particularly unsuccessful prom date. "The United States government has pressed France, Germany, and other European nations, from which many captured ISIS fighters came, to take them back, but they did not want them and refused. The United States will not hold them for what could be many years and great cost to the American taxpayer." Well, he certainly showed them, didn't he? This is a nightmare that only a twisted, compromised mind could concoct. God help us cope with whatever comes next.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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