The Kremlin continues to have Donald Trump’s number … although, to be fair, when it comes to Trump’s bizarre, bro-ish letter asking Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan not to slaughter Kurds in Syria, basically everyone has Trump’s number.
“Let’s work out a good deal! You don’t want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of people, and I don’t want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy—and I will,” Trump wrote, concluding, “Don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!” It was a letter so bizarre that reporters had to double-check with the White House that it was real. And that astonishing weirdness is exactly what a Russian official commented on.
“You don’t often encounter such language in correspondence between heads of state. It’s a highly unusual letter,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters. He’s not wrong. And it’s hard to read the fact that he bothered to comment on it, and in those terms, as anything but deserved mocking of Trump.