“THE PRESIDENT had a great conversation with Erdogan a couple of days ago,” Donald Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, told an interviewer on March 21st. “There’s just a lot of good, positive news coming out of Turkey.” As he spoke, the biggest protests in over a decade were spreading across the country. Perhaps Mr Witkoff was referring to America’s prospective sale of F-35 jets to Turkey, or to the country’s offer to mediate in Ukraine. But that he said nothing about the arrest on March 19th of Turkey’s top opposition politician, Ekrem Imamoglu, or the ensuing demonstrations, was probably not lost on President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkey’s leader is reading the mood in Western capitals and exploiting his position abroad to orchestrate a crackdown at home.