US President Donald Trump’s repeated muddling of global geography turned into comic relief for world leaders at a European summit this week.
At the European Political Community gathering in Copenhagen on Thursday, Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama drew laughter as he teased French President Emmanuel Macron and Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev. “You should make an apology … to us because you didn’t congratulate us on the peace deal that President Trump made between Albania and Azerbaijan,” Rama said, prompting Aliyev to erupt in laughter.
Macron responded with a joke, saying, “I am sorry for that.”
The joke hit home because Trump has frequently swapped “Albania” for “Armenia” when boasting about his foreign policy triumphs. “I solved wars that was unsolvable. Azerbaijan and Albania, it was going on for many, many years, I had the prime ministers and presidents in my office,” he claimed on Fox News last month.
Even at a press conference with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Trump blundered again. “We settled Aber-baijan and Albania,” he said, mispronouncing one country and misidentifying another.
In reality, Trump’s diplomatic breakthrough was between Armenia and Azerbaijan, whose leaders signed a US-brokered peace deal at the White House in August to end decades of conflict. The Republican leader has touted it as one of the pieces of evidence of his statesmanship, adding it to his long list of wars he claims he has stopped for a Nobel Peace Prize.
He has since insisted that he’s brought an end to seven wars since returning to the Oval Office, a claim the Associated Press has debunked. Among his supposed victories are Serbia and Kosovo, and even Egypt and Ethiopia, despite no ongoing wars between them.
India, meanwhile, dismissed Washington’s assertion that Trump had calmed tensions with Pakistan earlier this year.
On the campaign trail in 2023, he referred to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban as “the leader of Turkey”, wrongly stating Hungary shared a border with Russia. And before meeting Russian President Vladimir Putin in August, Trump declared, “We’re going to Russia. It’s going to be a big deal.” The summit was held not in Moscow but in Alaska.
