Social media is abuzz with new claims that Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan faked the coup attempt against the government after the country’s leader called the botched overthrow “a gift from Allah.” Posting under #TheaterNotCoup social media users ask aloud whether the whole think was an elaborate scheme for the Turkish strongman to garner even more control.

The theory originated when Politico’s European correspondent Ryan Heath said that a Turkish source of his believed that the entire debacle was a staged performance citing the fact that the government was able to communicate with everybody in Turkey via SMS text message and that Erdogan would be able to "clean" the military of secularists and install hardline Islamists in both the judiciary and the armed forces stripping away any constitutional check on the leader.

​The social media punditry, scoffed at as conspiracy theorists and crazies by most, argue that the hyperbolic Erdogan will use the coup attempt that left at least 265 dead and over 2000 wounded in the same fashion that Hitler used the Reichstag fire – the 1933 arson attack on the German parliament building which Hitler used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties and order mass arrests.

​There are many reasons to doubt this fanciful theory not the least that President Erdogan was on vacation when the coup plotters first seized the TRT news channel, the bridges, and Istanbul’s Ataturk International Airport. The leader was forced to phone in by FaceTime to CNN Turk to put out a desperate plea to the people of Turkey to take to the streets and put down the coup.

"This means it [the failed coup] will be followed by a real coup by Erdogan himself, and the last remnants of democracy will be lost," suggested one social media pundit.

The alleged mastermind of the coup according to Turkish officials, Fethullah Gulen, also trafficked the idea that the coup was staged saying "I don’t believe that the world believes the accusations made by President Erdoğan. There is a possibility that it could be a staged coup and it could be meant for further accusations [against the Gülenists]."

Whether the coup was ultimately fact or fiction, the world has been fundamentally changed by the horror descended on the streets of Istanbul and Ankara on Friday with the advantage clearly going to the coup’s survivor, Sputnik reported.

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