Donald Trump is playing all the cards he can get his "small" hands on. He is playing the "Pastor Andrew Brunson" card for the "Bible Belt." He is throwing some manufacturers a bone by simply levying taxes on imports from Europe and China. He tries to placate white supremacists by asking his secretary of state to investigate the land seizure in South Africa while there is no such thing there. Finally, his last maneuver is to threaten the U.S. public by saying that it is going to be Hell in America after him.
The evangelical pastor (Brunson), who has been working in İzmir for two decades, was arrested 21 months ago on charges of complicity in the 2016 coup attempt. His case has been all over the media since his arrest. If the U.S. decided it needed more information on the charges, they could have immediately asked for an explanation. They had done so when a local embassy translator was arrested in 2017. But they did not ask even a formal question about that pastor. Then, President Trump, in the middle of a night last month, started tweeting about him, demanding his immediate release. He shamelessly slammed Turkey, an ally for the last 70 years, with economic sanctions and illegal extra import taxes on Turkish steel and aluminum, and threatened with more "things" that Turkey would face. As a matter of fact, that night Turkish currency lost almost 30 percent of its value.
In the meantime, last week, Trump's national security adviser blurted out that the Turkish currency's freefall has been the U.S.'s doing, by saying that Turkey could end its lira-battering crisis "instantly" by freeing the pastor.
"Look, the Turkish government made a big mistake in not releasing Pastor Brunson," John-the-Walrus-Bolton told the Reuters news agency in an interview during a visit to Israel; "This crisis could be over instantly if they … release Pastor Brunson without condition."
This rather short sentence should have silenced the domestic and foreign "experts" who have been claiming that the currency fall was Turkey's own fault for not putting its own economic house in order. At the same time, it should have entered into the annals of this so-called "alliance."
We now know clearly what this alliance is all about. But back to Trump's latest threat.
The president seems about to be packing his bags at the White House – not very soon, perhaps. There are 69 days until elections. As many a politico could tell us that the coming midterm elections are all but a referendum on sending Trump to the gallows. He himself is mentioning his own impeachment! His last resort is to shake a stick at the people with retirement funds and savings accounts, people with investments in bonds and shares saying that if he ever got impeached, the market would crash. "I think everybody would be very poor," the president said in his Fox News interview that aired last week.
First off, there is a lot of time until your impeachment Mr. President. Even if the Democrats get the control of the House as expected, the Senate might still be in the hands of the GOP. Some liberals are hoping for a "blue wave" that would check your power, but that is a long shot. But as the philosophers – in their infinite wisdom – say, every situation has its own dynamics, a damning report from Mueller could have its own wave and your fellow Republicans might start saying things like this: "We, of course, love Mr. Trump, but we love justice more!"
Besides ... The markets that you think will tumble down right after you are impeached rejected the idea; even the U.S. Federal Reserve people said that the U.S. markets are weathered old structures that survived the George W. Bush disaster and its many economic crises.
If what the market leaders said after the bizarre threats of your own impeachment could be used as a gauge, the market would have already started to gear up for such an eventuality.
Your rhetoric about Iran, Russia and China, and treating the European Union as an "enemy" have already shown the whole world who you are. Now it is the turn of the people of the U.S. to see who you really are.
