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Trump's letter to Turkey's president is almost beyond parody, but not beyond memes

"Dear President Erdogan: do not email my wife."

Caitlin Welsh

on October 16, 2019

When Donald Trump "leaked" his Oct. 9 letter to Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Wednesday, he undoubtedly thought it made him seem tough. What actually happened is that it was so ridiculous that nobody who read it believed it was real at first.

Between the fifth-grade vocabulary, the overuse of exclamation marks, and the kind of generally belligerent but ineffective attempts at being intimidating you get when you cheap out on your hired goons, it was understandably hard to believe this was Sharpie-scrawled on the actual Resolute Desk, let alone allowed out of the building to be delivered to another world leader with whom the US is currently embroiled in a serious military and diplomatic crisis.

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Naturally, once its veracity was confirmed and everyone had done their best to come to terms with the latest new low, they coped with memes.

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And of course, some people put in a little extra effort, and our decayed discourse — and fried brains — are better for it.

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When all of this is over, I can't wait for that last one to win all the Tonys.

Topics Donald Trump Memes Politics

Caitlin Welsh

Caitlin is Mashable's Australian Editor. She has written for The Guardian, Junkee, and any number of plucky little music and culture publications that were run on the smell of an oily rag and have since been flushed off the Internet like a dead goldfish by their new owners. She also worked at Choice, Australia's consumer advocacy non-profit and magazine, and as such has surprisingly strong opinions about whitegoods. She enjoys big dumb action movies, big clever action movies, cult Canadian comedies set in small towns, Carly Rae Jepsen, The Replacements, smoky mezcal, revenge bedtime procrastination, and being left the hell alone when she's reading.