Trump Compares Turks and Kurds to 'Two Kids' Fighting

Speaking at a campaign rally hours after Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brokered a cease-fire, Trump defended his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, effectively clearing the way for a brutal Turkish assault on Kurdish fighters who had fought for years alongside the United States against the Islamic State.

The president’s decision to pull out drew rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans, who accused him of abandoning America’s friends. But Trump said the violence of the past week was useful. “It was unconventional what I did,” he acknowledged. “Sometimes you have to let them fight a little while. Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids,” he added. “Then you pull them apart.”

While he has previously denied giving Turkey the green light to attack the Kurds, Trump implied Thursday night that actually he had done so in order to persuade the two sides to come to terms. “Without a little tough love, they would never have made this deal,” he said.

The president arrived in Dallas after days of roiling events and damaging developments. Republicans blistered him for his Syria decision while current and former government officials provided House investigators evidence for Democrats seeking to impeach him for abuse of power. His own acting chief of staff earlier Thursday confirmed that there was a quid pro quo in Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for dirt on Democrats before then trying to take it back.

The rally gave the president a chance to vent his frustrations and pique with more than 20,000 cheering supporters packed in American Airlines Center in Dallas. In his third campaign rally in just more than a week, Trump again complained that Democrats were seeking to impeach him out of partisan animus and political ambition.

“They are destroying this country, but we will never let it happen,” he told the crowd. “These radical Democrats have been trying to overthrow the results of a great, great election — maybe, maybe the greatest election in the history of our country. They want to impose their extreme agenda.”

He added, “You know, I really don’t believe any more that they love our country.”

A day after a sharp blowup with Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the White House resulted in Democrats’ walking out of a meeting, he singled her out for criticism. “Crazy Nancy,” he called her. “She is crazy.”

And he lashed out again at the unidentified CIA officer who filed the whistleblower complaint revealing that Trump pressed Ukraine to investigate Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, while withholding $391 million in congressionally approved assistance.

“Who’s the whistleblower?” Trump demanded. “Who’s the whistleblower? Who is the whistleblower? Is the whistleblower a spy?”

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who represented El Paso, Texas, in Congress and is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination next year, staged a counterprogramming rally at a concert hall in Grand Prairie about 13 miles to the west.

O’Rourke condemned “the fabricated fear of the president, who wants us to be afraid of one another,” and blamed Trump’s language for the August mass shooting in El Paso and for a slew of other hate crimes.

“That fear that Donald Trump, the man in the White House, who holds the highest position of public trust in the land — that fear that he’s trying to use against us, that fear that he directed and drove down to El Paso, Texas, that fear that claimed the lives of 22 Americans — we, those of us here together, standing to be counted, are the answer to that fear,” O’Rourke said.

Trump hit back at O’Rourke at his own rally, calling the Democrat “a very dumb presidential candidate” and attacking him for proposing a mandatory buyback of assault rifles and the revocation of tax exemptions for contributions to churches that oppose same-sex marriage.

“Got rid of guns and got rid of religion,” Trump said mockingly. “I will never allow the federal government to punish Americans for their religious beliefs.”

He also singled out other favorite Democratic targets, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Biden.

Trump’s trip to Texas stirred interest among political strategists because the state has long been a bedrock for Republican presidential candidates and is therefore not a battleground that attracts as much campaigning. In devoting a day here headlining a fundraiser in Fort Worth and cutting the ribbon on a new Louis Vuitton workshop in Keene, Trump prompted Democrats to declare that he must be worried about losing the state.

For Democrats, Texas has been the elusive holy grail for years, always supposedly close to flipping from red to blue yet remaining out of reach. Texas has not supported a Democrat for president since 1976 or for any statewide office since 1994. But as the state’s demographic makeup shifts, Democrats insist change is inevitable. Trump won the state in 2016 by 9 percentage points, the first single-digit margin at the presidential level in 20 years, and O’Rourke came within 2.6 points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz last year.

A poll last month showed that Trump could be in trouble this time around. Forty-eight percent of Texans surveyed by Quinnipiac University said they would definitely not vote for him next year while only 35% said they would definitely support him and 14% said they would consider it.

But the president’s campaign team scoffed at what it called Democratic wishful thinking, saying that the only reason O’Rourke came close last year was because Trump was not on the ballot. Tim Murtaugh, his campaign spokesman, said the president made the trip Thursday not out of concern but to connect with his strongest backers.

“You’ve got to campaign and go show love to the people who got you there,” Murtaugh said. Rather than be turned off by the impeachment battle, he said, Trump’s base has been energized. “I didn’t think it was possible for the president’s supporters to be more engaged, but impeachment has achieved that,” he said.

Trump declared that Texas would remain in his column. “Texas is not in play,” he said.

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