Michael Rubin
AEI.ORG, Mar. 30, 2025
“The Turkish protestors now fight for the soul of their nation.”
Two million Turks have gathered in Istanbul to protest President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s decision to arrest his main rival, Ekrem İmamoğlu, on trumped-up corruption and terror charges. Turks are not stupid; they see through Erdoğan’s cynicism and comment on its ironies: Erdoğan accuses İmamoğlu of corruption, but Erdoğan not only has pending corruption cases dating to his own tenure as mayor, but he has since accumulated billions of dollars in unexplained wealth. He accuses İmamoğlu of supporting terror, but Turkish journalists photographed Erdoğan’s intelligence service transporting weaponry to an Al Qaeda affiliate in Turkey.
The kicker is Erdoğan’s decision to cancel İmamoğlu’s university degree, without which he does not qualify for the presidency. Not only was Erdoğan’s own degree fraudulent, but the grounds for dismissing İmamoğlu’s degree were the illegitimacy of the university he attended in occupied northern Cyprus. As with its universities, so too is it with its entire regime.
President Donald Trump sees himself as a winner and despises losers. Whereas he may once have seen Erdoğan as a strongman, it is now clear that the would-be sultan wears no clothes. Trump and his team are correct: Turkey is important, but Turkey and Erdoğan are not synonymous. Simply put, Trump should dump Erdoğan.
Turkey’s elite soldiers swear allegiance to the state and the people of Turkey, not one man who holds the constitution and rule of law with disdain…..SOURCE