If Donald Trump thought Recep Tayyip Erdogan was going to be a pushover in the protracted diplomatic dispute centered around detained Christian pastor Andrew Brunson, the U.S. President has been disabused of that notion in a big way.
One day after announcing a boycott of U.S. electronics including iPhones, Erdogan took things up a notch on Wednesday, slapping tariffs on everything from rice to liquor to cars to makeup to tobacco. Specifically, there are 22 items on Erdogan’s list. Additional levies on alcoholic beverages and cars are in excess of 100%.
Although the list doesn’t include mobile phones, Turkish retailer BIM, the country’s largest hard discount retail chain by revenue, has reportedly stopped selling iPhones. (You know you wanted a Vestel Venus anyway).
This escalation comes two days after John Bolton told Serdar Kilic that negotiations will not resume until Andrew Brunson is released and a day after Reuters quoted a U.S. official as suggesting the Trump administration is prepared to move forward with further sanctions on Turkey unless U.S. personnel are released post haste.
“The administration is going to stay extremely firm on this”, the official said, adding that Trump “is 100 percent committed to bringing Pastor Brunson home and if we do not see actions in the next few days or a week there could be further actions taken.”
Well guess what? Erdogan says Trump can forget it. On Wednesday, attorneys for Brunson had their appeal rejected for a second time, according to Hurriyet. Late last month, a Turkish court rejected a similar appeal by Brunson’s lawyers to have him released and for his travel ban to be lifted.
And it gets better. Also on Wednesday, Turk Telecom, the country’s largest phone company, started a “Don’t Advertise to U.S.” campaign and has now canceled its ad budget for U.S. digital firms. “Some global companies get significant advertising income from our country without paying taxes”, Turk Telecom said in a statement. “Getting such services from domestic companies will keep media spending in our country.”
According to Bloomberg, the list of items subject to Erdogan’s additional tariffs totals about $1 billion in imports, making this a commensurate response to Trump’s decision to double levies on metals from Turkey.
We’ve said this before and we’ll probably say it another hundred times over the next couple weeks: Erdogan is not a guy you can bully on Twitter. So Trump can give up the Twitter “diplomacy.”
In fact, Erdogan is a guy who throws people in jail for sharing memes of him on social media and on Monday, Turkey’s interior ministry said he’s all set to start a series of investigations into some 350 social media accounts that have posted negative things about the beleaguered lira over the past couple of weeks. According to the Istanbul prosecutor’s office, this probe will target individuals who have “threatened Turkey’s economic security” by daring to post comments about the currency’s weakening “in a provocative way.”
Who knows, maybe Turkey will indict Trump before Mueller does.
