IN JUNE, a few months after Donald Trump, then a candidate for the Republican nomination, called for a ban on Muslim immigration, Turkey’s Islamist leader objected. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan demanded that Mr Trump’s name be removed from Trump Towers in Istanbul. “The ones who put that brand on their building should remove it immediately,” he said.
Mr Erdogan appears to have changed his mind, both about the towers and about the man whose name appears on them. Although polls show that most Turks would have preferred to see Hillary Clinton as America’s new president, Mr Trump’s election has been greeted in Ankara with a mix of schadenfreude and hope. “We were suffering from [American] policies towards the Middle East and Turkey under the Democrats and Obama,” says Yasin Aktay, a deputy chairman of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party. “This opens a new page.” The Turkish president has been even more emphatic, calling protests against Mr Trump’s election in America and Europe “a disrespect to democracy”.
Flattery may have gotten Mr Trump somewhere: he reportedly told Mr Erdogan over the phone that his...Continue reading
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