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D##### Donald Trump just gave the internet one of the most unhinged moments of the year by claiming the “Islamic Republic of Japan” fired 111 missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier during a NATO summit press conference.
The whole thing happened on July 8 while he was standing next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Ankara, Turkey, and the internet immediately caught the slip-up.
He’s talking about the USS Abraham Lincoln like it’s some kind of action movie, saying the missiles came in over the course of an hour and every single one got intercepted.
The problem is Japan isn’t called the Islamic Republic of anything, and they’re literally one of America’s closest military allies for the past 75 years.
What Trump was actually referencing, according to USA Today, was an incident involving Iran, not Japan.
Back in February, the U.S. shot down an Iranian drone that was approaching the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Arabian Sea, roughly 500 miles off Iran’s coast.
Then in March, Iran claimed it struck the carrier with a ballistic missile, but U.S. Central Command immediately pushed back on that story, saying the Lincoln wasn’t hit and the missiles didn’t even come close.
The carrier kept launching aircraft for operations against Iranian threats, so clearly nothing major happened.
Donald.Trump just mixed up the country names and turned it into some wild story about Japan attacking America.
The U.S. and Japan have been locked in a military alliance since 1952, seven years after World War II ended, and they’ve got a mutual defense agreement that keeps roughly 60,000 American troops stationed across Japan.
So the idea that Japan would fire missiles at a U.S. carrier is completely absurd, which makes Trump’s comment even more ridiculous.
