My own suspicion is that he made himself look vulnerable, and laced the underground opposition with provocateurs, so that a real coup would occur, but he would know their every move and simply round them up.
Good point. He immediately came out with that list of people involved in the coup, as though he were itching for an excuse to get rid of them.
It’s a common tactic in America, too: a bunch of liberals pretend to endorse Donald Trump, and then say something ridiculous to attempt to tar all Trump supporters with the same brush. The liberals have failed to make inroads the same way Erdogan has in Turkey because they ultimately do not understand how conservatives think, so their impressions of conservatives simply come off as amateur caricatures.
But one thing we should always be aware of is that liberals are constantly improving their means of subversion and destruction. It took the Muslims thousands of years to do so, but they have managed to turn a nation founded on the anti-Islamic ideals of Ataturk into just another Muslim trash heap.