Donald Trump (AP file photo)
US President Donald Trump has always benefited from the mistakes of his rivals, but his latest mistakes have pointed the finger at him.He once checked out a set of Joe Biden’s stumbles at a campaign rally.
When Biden conflated Trump with Kamala Harris during the 2024 race, Trump happily responded to X: “Great job, Joe!” When Barack Obama once made the mistake of talking about visiting 57 states, Trump posted: “Can you imagine if I said that.
Story of the year!He has now said things like that over and over again.The latest came at the NATO summit in Ankara on Wednesday, where Trump made three notable errors in less than ten minutes while sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
He referred to Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan” while recounting a missile attack, distorting the acronym for the Iran nuclear deal, calling it “JCPOC” instead of JCPOA. Trump then asked the assembled reporters if they had a “question for President Putin” as Zelensky sat next to him.
Biden made a nearly identical conflation of Zelensky and Putin at the 2024 NATO summit.
Growing list
In June, Trump called Elon Musk “Leon” during his remarks during a tour of the refurbished Air Force One, before restraining himself two sentences later.
Days before the NATO summit, and at an event at the White House, Trump appeared presenting the head of the Small Business Administration, Kelly Loeffler, in the role of rapper Nicki Minaj, twice in the same speech, once by mistake, and once apparently intentionally.
At a ceremony in May honoring Indiana University’s national football championship, Trump asked about the whereabouts of coach Curt Cignetti. Cignetti was standing right next to him the whole time.Also in May, Trump attributed the US withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, and the killing of 13 US service members at Kabul airport, to Barack Obama, who left office in January 2017. Biden oversaw the withdrawal.When a reporter that same month asked Trump about Xi Jinping’s comments about the risk of conflict over Taiwan, Trump answered as if the question were about Iran, referring to its “strait.”In April, Trump declared during an interview that “Ukraine has been defeated militarily” before that was clear from the context. He cited the number of ships and the country’s navy, and that he was describing Iran, not Ukraine.
At a Women’s History Month event that same month, he introduced press secretary Carolyn Levitt using a description that closely matched her role, but called her Kellyanne Conway.At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Trump repeatedly replaced Iceland with Greenland, an island he has made the centerpiece of his regional agenda.
In a November speech in Miami, he described the city as a refuge for those fleeing tyranny in “South Africa” before correcting himself to South America, then returning to South Africa anyway.Last year, Trump twice claimed credit for resolving the conflict between Azerbaijan and Albania, a non-existent war. The conflict he mediated involves Azerbaijan and Armenia.Before his high-stakes summit with Vladimir Putin in August, Trump twice told crowds that he was traveling to Russia, and the meeting was held in Alaska, which has not been part of Russia since the 1860s.
