Just what the hell was this supposed to be about? From CNN:

Trump joins a short list of leaders who have openly congratulated Erdogan, including Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Saudi King Salman.

What a bunch. Let's have them all go bowling and, if they lose, they can behead the guy who rents the shoes.

The Turkish election was an act of democratic euthanasia. Turkey's democracy was on life support and the election, which almost assuredly was as crooked as a dog's hind leg, was the way the country pulled the plug. Again, from CNN:

Representatives from a coalition of international bodies said the vote took place on an "unlevel playing field" with the "yes" campaign dominating media coverage. Voters were not provided with adequate information, opposition voices were muzzled and the rules were changed at the last minute, they said. "The legal framework remained inadequate for the holding of a genuinely democratic referendum," the monitors' initial report stated. The conclusions drew a stiff rebuke from Turkey's Foreign Ministry, which said the monitors' findings are a "reflection" of a "biased and prejudiced approach." "The comment that the referendum was below international standards is unacceptable," the ministry statement said.

As The New York Times elaborated:

The statement did not say whether Mr. Trump had raised independent reports of voting irregularities during the Turkish referendum or the government's heavy-handed tactics in the weeks leading up to it, when the country was under a state of emergency. The State Department noted both issues in a more cautious, less laudatory statement issued a few hours earlier. The White House was also silent about the long-term implications of the referendum, which some experts have likened to a deathblow to democracy in Turkey. Mr. Erdogan's narrow victory, in effect, ratifies his authoritarian rule. The change to Turkey's Constitution will allow the winner of the 2019 presidential election to assume full control of the government, ending the current parliamentary political system.

And this is not reassuring.

Mr. Trump and Mr. Erdogan are viewed as ideological bedfellows: They are populist leaders with little patience for the courts or other checks on their power. But Mr. Erdogan has taken his authoritarian bent to an extreme, imposing the state of emergency and purging the opposition, academia and the army after a failed coup last year.

Erdogan is a thug and a strongman. So far, he's been pretty good at being both of those. Trump would dearly love to be both of those, but he doesn't have the courage to be the former or the smarts to be the latter. That's been part of what's kept a lot of really bad things at bay over here since November. But the sight of the leader of the world's leading democracy congratulating the leader of a successful slow-motion coup d'etat—I know, I know. Diplomacy. Alliances. All that stuff. But, like everything else, the current president* makes this different.

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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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