SYRIA/TRUMP AS PRESIDENT/TURKEY: “You know, we were guarding the border between Turkey and Syria, and for years, and we had thousands of people there. And I said, ‘Wait a minute, let me ask you this: Turkey, Syria, two big countries, they know how to guard their border. They’ve been fighting with each other for years. Why do we have thousands of soldiers? Ultimately, we got it down to 57 soldiers and then 27 soldiers. And then they were getting a little hostile toward each other. I said, ‘Get my 27 soldiers out.’ And that was about a year ago.
And I took a lot of heat. People said, ‘Oh, that’s terrible.’ I said, ‘No, it’s not terrible.’ Nothing has happened on the border. They’ve been fighting each other for 1,000 years, under different names. From probably a lot longer than 1,000 years. I said, ‘I don’t want my troops there.’
So we’re essentially out of Syria, other than we kept the oil.”
-Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump in Meeting with Governor Abbott of Texas,” whitehouse.gov, May 7, 2020