President Donald Trump misspoke on Wednesday at the NATO summit in Ankara, Turkey, mixing up the names of foreign leaders and countries.
While taking questions after meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump asked reporters if they had any questions for “President Putin,” but was signaling toward Zelensky, who was sitting beside him.
“Do you have any questions for President Putin?” Trump said. “Reporters quickly corrected Trump, in which the president then asked the question again, “Do you have a question for President Putin, not Zelensky.
“What would you like to ask him, because I’m going to ask him that question,” he said.
Trump’s Putin-Zelensky mix-up comes almost two years after former President Joe Biden made a similar mistake at the 2024 NATO summit in Washington, D.C., when Biden introduced Zelensky as “President Putin.”
“And now I want to hand it over to the president of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he does determination,” Biden said. “Ladies and gentlemen, President Putin.”
The slipup was the second time Trump misspoke while taking questions from reporters with Zelensky at the summit. In the same press conference, Trump referred to the Islamic Republic of Iran as the “Islamic Republic of Japan.”
“I told this story yesterday, we had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan,” Trump said. “They were shot at the aircraft carrier over a period of about one hour. One hundred-and-eleven missiles going to a very expensive ship, and every one of those missiles was knocked down, pretty much most by patriots, but by other means also.”
Trump appeared to be referring to an Iranian attack against the USS Abraham Lincoln from earlier this year, but credited the shots to Japan — an ally of the United States that has not attacked the country since World War II.
The president was addressing the military war with Iran resuming, after the U.S. hit more than 80 targets on Tuesday following an Iranian attack on commercial vessels transiting the Strait of Hormuz.
Trump said the 60-day ceasefire with Iran is “over.”
The memorandum of understanding between the U.S. and Iran, signed by Trump in June, established the 60-day ceasefire while the two countries finalized a larger agreement ending the conflict that would include Iran’s nuclear program.
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The deadline for the MOU is set to expire in the middle of August.
As tensions between the U.S. and Iran escalated, Trump addressed Tuesday’s military attack and called the Iranian regime “scum.”
“They’re scum,” Trump said. “They’re sick people. They’re led by sick people. They’re vicious, violent people, and if they had a nuclear weapon they’d use it.”