WASHINGTON -- Moments after landing in Texas for a day of politicking, President Donald Trump boasted that he’d just averted millions of deaths and gave a major boost to civilization itself, after Turkey agreed to a 5-day ceasefire in its attacks on Kurds -- U.S. allies he had effectively abandoned last week.

“This is an amazing outcome,” he said. “You would have lost millions and millions of lives. You wouldn’t get it without a little rough love.”

By that, he was referring to the invasion by Turkey that began after Trump abruptly, and without consultation with Congress or European allies, ordered U.S. troops out of the region. Over the last seven years, Kurdish fighters have taken the brunt of the U.S. effort to decimate the Islamic State, but Turkey, another U.S. ally, has long viewed that ethnic group on its border as a danger.

At least 100,000 Kurds reportedly have been displaced in the last week, after President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took Trump’s withdrawal as a green light to push into Kurd-held territory, establishing a long “safety zone” that Trump described as a 22-mile strip.

“They’ve had terrorists, they had a lot of people in there that they couldn’t have… They had to have it cleaned out,” Trump said, defending Turkey’s actions. “This outcome is something they’ve been trying to get for 10 years.... It’s a great day for civilization.”

U.S. lawmakers from both parties have almost universally condemned the withdrawal Trump ordered, accusing him of abandoning a key ally in the fight against terrorism and blaming him for a slaughter of Kurds.

“What Turkey is getting now is, they’re not going to have to kill millions of people, and millions of people aren’t going to have to kill them,” Trump said.

Vice President Mike Pence, in Turkey, announced the ceasefire shortly before Trump arrived in Texas, where he’ll hold a campaign rally at the American Airlines Center in downtown Dallas, after a fund-raising lunch in Fort Worth, and a ribbon cutting in Johnson County at a luxury handbag factory.

Trump credited his threat to step up sanctions on Turkey for bringing a halt to the fighting.

The safe zone is “something that Turkey has always wanted," Trump said, but “the Kurds and other people are going to be taken great care of.... We will be watching. We will be in charge."

And he said, despite the warnings of critics who say he has created a power vacuum that Russia, Syria and Iran have already been able to exploit, “We’ve gotten everything we could have ever dreamed of…. We’ll be able to have control of ISIS, total….They’re never going to be ruling us.”

In Congress, the truce was seen not as a victory for civilization but as a way to mitigate the damage from an ill-conceived withdrawal, or worse, a way for Turkey to leverage the military might it has already flexed to drive remaining Kurds out of territory it recently seized.

“It is far from a victory,” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, who at one point Trump had considered for secretary of state, said on the Senate floor. “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a blood stain in the annals of American history.”

Rubio: "It does not appear to me, however, with all due respect , that this is really a ceasefire, it is more an ultimatum." paraphrase: It's Erdogan saying here is land that I'm going to take, the Kurds can leave in 5 days, or I'm going to kill them. — Michael McAuliff (@mmcauliff) October 17, 2019

Air Force One landed at Naval Air Station Fort Worth just before 2 p.m.

Freshman Rep. Lance Gooden, R-Terrell, was among the passengers.

“We’re having a big rally tonight at the American Airlines Center,” Trump said. “They’ve been standing in line for three days you know. It’s a record crowd over in Dallas.”

The arena seats 21,000. Five hours ahead of the rally, hundreds of people were on line waiting to get in.

He’ll be coming from a ribbon cutting in Keene, Texas, for a new Louis Vuitton factory.

“We’re in Texas now and we’re going to be opening up a phenomenal new plant,” he said on the tarmac in Fort Worth. “One of the greatest men in business, in all of business is with us. You know who he is. And they’re opening up a plant in Texas. The first time I believe one of the great companies of the world, first time ever in the United States.”

The business titan whose name he didn’t mention was likely Bernard Arnault, chairman and CEO of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.