During a question-and-answer session with Americans who had once been held captive by foreign governments, President Donald Trump on Monday night told a pastor who had been held in Turkey that while President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan may have kept him in bondage for nearly two years, the strongman “was very good” to Trump himself. “To me, President Erdoğan was very good,” Trump said in a prerecorded video shot in the White House, after Pastor Andrew Brunson described the conditions he was held in for more than 21 months for the alleged crime of “Christianization” in the majority Muslim country. Erdoğan is one of many authoritarian leaders for whom the president has expressed an affinity.
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