Would Trump be happy if Erdoğan had been toppled?

Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan was among the first leaders to congratulate Donald Trump on the day he was elected as the 45th president of the United States on Nov. 8.

Ankara had actually calculated that Hillary Clinton would win and made all preparations accordingly. Clinton's approaches on Syria and Iraq, the anti-terror fight, human rights, judicial independence and media freedom were already known. These approaches were not exactly in line with Erdoğan and Prime Minister Binali Yıldırım's Justice and Development Party (AK Parti) government, but at least Clinton was the devil they knew.

President Barack Obama's administration was hesitant about extraditing Fethullah Gülen, the Pennsylvania-based Islamist preacher, an old ally of Erdoğan who is now seen as the mastermind behind the bloody July 15 military coup attempt. Documents show that Gülen and his network donated a total of nearly $2 million to the Clinton campaign, and were also linked through the same PR companies.

What's more, one of Trump's closest aides, retired general Mike Flynn, had published an article on the eve of the election in The Hill magazine, saying the U.S. should not continue to carry the burden of Gülen and his network. When considered together with the words of an unnamed U.S. official who recently said Gülen's network resembled a money-laundering gang, rather than an innocent religious convent, it started to look like an Al Capone-style future could be waiting for Gülen, if not exactly an Usama bin Laden-style end as Erdoğan desired.

Flynn has since been named as Trump's National Security Advisor and is scheduled to start in the post on Jan. 20, 2017. In the meantime, a number of his controversial remarks - such as when he said he found Islamophobia ...