There is a surprise twist in the saga of why Donald Trump got on the phone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday night and decided, without consulting with any of his military, national security or foreign policy advisers, to pull troops out of northern Syria so Turkey could massacre some Kurds. Are you ready for the twist? It is a good twist you didn't see coming.

The twist is that Donald Trump is a spineless moron who's bad at deals.

Riiiiiiiight? Told you it was a surprising twist!

According to somebody Newsweekspoke to, who has "direct" knowledge of the phone call, Trump simply got "rolled" by Erdoğan. Hey, remember last time Trump tried to end US involvement in Syria all of a sudden? It was after a phone call with Erdoğan, where he clearly got rolled. That time, Trump was met with universal condemnation, including from members of his own party, and he quickly caved and changed his mind. We will not be surprised if that happens on this one too, considering how Republicans are acting.

Anyway, Turkey said it was going to invade, and once Trump got on the call, he was like "OK":

"President Trump was definitely out-negotiated and only endorsed the troop withdraw[al] to make it look like we are getting something—but we are not getting something," the National Security Council source told Newsweek. "The U.S. national security has entered a state of increased danger for decades to come because the president has no spine and that's the bottom line."

No spine and we got nothing out of the deal? Yep, sounds like our American president!

Newsweek's source said they were anticipating Turkey would start doing war in that area within days, and surprise, we are already seeing evidence it is readying to do just that. At issue has been a buffer zone the United States and the Syrian Defense Forces (AKA the Kurds) had been establishing along the Syria-Turkey border, the whole point of which has been to keep Turkey from invading. But we guess after this call, Turkey is invited to do whatever it wants there! (Oh, and Turkey has plans. They involve getting the Kurds out of that place, which happens to be where many Kurds live.)

Though Trump didn't reportedly tell Erdoğan he was OK with the Turkish invasion on the call, the source notes that he didn't say we were going to sanction Turkey or anything if they did invade. So again, spineless.

And because Trump is a fact-free idiot who does foreign leader phone calls with bad information, he's apparently been obsessed with who's in charge of holding the 2,000 ISIS prisoners in northern Syria. Trump seems to think America has been doing that up to now, when actually that's been handled by the Syrian Defense Forces, albeit with American financial support. Anyway, that is Turkey's job now, and according to Newsweek's NSC source, this means some of them will probably just end up getting released to go forth and be terrorists some more. (And because this is a fact-free White House, the official announcement of the Sunday pull-out included a whole graf bitching about America no longer wanting to take responsibility for all these prisoners, probably because Trump dictated it himself. What, did you think Stephanie Grisham was going to fact-check him? That is NOT her 'sponsibility, OSSIFER.)

Heckuva job, Donald!

Last night, Brett McGurk, who was the Trump administration's special envoy for the coalition to defeat ISIS until he resigned last time Trump pulled this shit, appeared on the Rachel Maddow program and confirmed that one of the things about Trump in these situations is that he has a lot of "bluster," but very little follow-through.

You know, "bluster" like this:

IN HIS GREAT AND UNMATCHED WISDOM!

Tuesday morning, Trump continued to "bluster" the only place he feels safe to "bluster," which is from the safety of the White House behind his magical Twitter phone, the one that amplifies his voice and makes him sound WOOOOOOOO SPOOKY SCARY!

Giphy

It even looks like his stupid bad body and hair, doesn't it.

Anyway, we meant for that to be a Trump tweet from this morning, but accidentally posted Toto pulling the Wizard's pants down and playing chew-toy with his peen. So, pretty samesies with what we're talking about right now, but here's the real tweet anyway:

Right, Big 'n' Tough, we bet.

There's also reporting on the call coming from the Turkish side now, and boy oh boy, we miss the days when the rest of the world viewed the American president as a non-chickenshit entity. According to a Turkish official Middle East Eye spoke to, Erdoğan was not pleased after the call, wherein he reportedly "told Trump that the US should either work with Turkey to conduct this operation or just get out of the way." We guess it went like this:

Erdoğan: MURDER YOUR ALLIES WITH US OR LEAVE!

Trump: OK!

Erdoğan: Wait, which one are you saying OK to?

Trump: aDaM sChIfF dId a tReAsOn!!!1!!1!! Did you see Judge Jeanine tonight?

And then he got out of the way!

Anyway, everybody was blindslded, including our own military, with Politico reporting that according to a "person familiar with the U.S. government's policy deliberations," Trump simply "went rogue," and now everybody is trying to clean up the mess he made. NBC News reports that the Defense and State departments are saying unequivocally that they DO NOT CAPITAL DO NOT support a Turkish invasion of northern Syria, and everybody is ready for some serious backpedaling from Trump, because that's how these things work.

So that's a very CliffsNotes version of what we know about Trump's call with President Erdoğan and where things stand right now. The basic reporting suggests that this is happening because Trump caved on a call with a foreign dictator AGAIN, and now we are just really curious to see the transcript of the call, which has probably been placed in the secret Bin Laden vault in the White House where Trump stores his deepest darkest embarrassments and crimes.

There's been a lot of focus the last few weeks on Trump's very bad calls with foreign leaders, so we'll close this piece by dropping a scary possibility on you and then ghosting. We were joking yesterday when we asked if Turkey promised to investigate Joe Biden, and that's why Trump did what Erdoğan wants. We are not joking as much when we say that Turkey probably has a lot on Trump, and that it likely knows a lot about what Trump really did to help his Saudi buddies cover up the Saudi murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which happened at the embassy in Istanbul. We are just saying.

Point is, if Trump is getting rolled this hard, then it's entirely possible THE AMERICAN PRESIDENT is literally taking orders from the president of Turkey in matters of war, because Turkey's got something on him.

But yeah, it's also possible Trump is just really that stupid.

SHOW US THE VAULT.

[Newsweek]

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