Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan refers to Israel as a “terrorist state,” guilty of both “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing,” while at the same time refuses to designate Hamas as a terrorist organization. Instead, Erdogan insists that Hamas is simply a “resistance movement.” While the Turkish president has a long history of hosting and championing the leading figures of Hamas, he frequently compares Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Adolf Hitler.

Under Erdogan’s presidency, thousands of Turks have been prosecuted and imprisoned for the crime of insulting the Turkish president, which is punishable by up to four years in prison. While Erdogan is shielded from criticism by the criminalization of his critics, he has a free hand to crackdown on human rights and to commit human rights abuses, such as those committed against women, Kurds, and Christians. 

Erdogan’s comradeship with Russia’s communist dictator, Vladimir Putin, which netted Turkey a Russian S-400 air defense system back in 2020, resulted in Trump putting Turkey, a supposed NATO ally in cahoots with communist Russia, on Trump’s own sanctions list, under Trump’s Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). However, in his recent visit to Turkey, for a NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey’s capital, Trump praised Erdogan and promised to remove Turkey from his CAATSA sanctions list. According to Trump, he might have skipped the NATO summit altogether if it had not been hosted by Erdogan, his great friend with whom he had such great chemistry. Trump went on to tout the Turkish president as a “very strong leader” who has made Turkey a “much better country.”

Although Trump’s chummy relationship with and complimentary ravings about Erdogan, as well as promise to remove Turkey from our CAATSA sanctions list, is disconcerting enough, what was most disconcerting of all was Trump’s public comments at the NATO summit that he is now seriously considering providing Erdogan’s regime with American F-35 stealth combat aircraft. Whether you love Trump or loath him, you must admit that he is often a contradiction in terms. For instance, as Andrew McCarthy has pointed out, Trump’s treatment of small-time narco-boats off the coast of South America, as deadly terrorist threats, which necessitate the use of lethal force, can’t be squared with his selling of F-35 stealth combat aircraft to a foreign head of state whose government actively harbors and supports designated terrorist organizations. Truly, the enigma of Donald Trump, who is inconsistent and self-contradictory, is often incomprehensible, leaving us all scratching our heads with our eyes crossed. It’s like trying to unify opposite poles and getting them to pull in the same direction, though they are diametrically opposed to one another.