Trump’s diplomacy reserved its smiles for nondemocracies that offered commercial opportunities, not only in the Persian Gulf and the Philippines, but even in the case of as bad an actor as Recep Erdoğan’s Turkey, also home to a major Trump-branded project in Istanbul. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson visited Turkey on July 15, 2017, the one-year anniversary of an attempted coup that the Erdoğan regime had used as an excuse for mass roundups of political opponents, and especially journalists. In April 2017, a fraud-stained referendum had approved constitutional amendments that would empower
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