President Trump was caught tongue-tied as he touted brokering a peace deal between Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“For the Aberbaijan – that was a big one going on for 34, 35 years, er Albania, I mean, think of that, going on for years, and I got to know the heads and I got to know them through trade. I was dealing with them a little bit and saying, ‘Why are you guys fighting?’” Trump said during The Mark Levin Show on Tuesday, where he also repeated claims that he had ended “seven wars.”
Earlier this month, Trump announced a peace deal, ending decades of conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia, two nations who have been in a state of tension since the 1980s.
“And I said, ‘I’m not going to do a trade deal if you guys are going to fight – it’s crazy. Anyway, one thing led to another, and I got that one settled,” the commander-in-chief added.
“At the end of an hour, they were hugging and congratulating each other. It was beautiful to see, actually,” he said.
Negotiations initially kicked off in March, when the two governments said they were prepared to end the nearly forty-year conflict. However, it wasn’t until the Trump administration hosted the leaders of the two nations at the White House on August 8 that they agreed to a peace deal.
The agreement includes a joint declaration of peace, a joint request to dissolve the OSCE Minsk Group, and a provision granting the United States sole development rights over a transit route from the Nakhchivan exclave through southern Armenia to Azerbaijan, referred to as the “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity,” according to the Council of Foreign Relations.
The president’s opponents on social media were quick to jump on this latest faux pas, with the account Republicans Against Trump branding him as “Dementia Don.”
Other users slammed him for double standards after he spent months lambasting former President Joe Biden for his cognitive issues.
“Dementia Don strikes again. Trump claims he solved the conflict between “Aber-baijan and Albania. (He meant Armenia and Azerbaijan, but close enough, right?),” the account wrote Wednesday.
One X user said, “It’s so unfair to Trump that so many countries choose to have names beginning with the same letter. But of course, with just 26 letters in the alphabet, it’s tricky. But that’s probably Biden’s fault.”
Another said, “If Biden had said this, MAGA would scream dementia Joe Trump’s mistake, they stay silent #Hypocrisy.”
Azerbaijan and Armenia sparred over Nagorno-Karabakh, an ethnically Armenian enclave in Azerbaijan, in the 1980s and 1990s. The first Karabakh war, from 1988 to 1994, resulted in roughly thirty thousand casualties and created hundreds of thousands of refugees.
Upon brokering the peace deal this month, Trump said Armenia and Azerbaijan had promised to stop all fighting “forever” as well as open up travel, business, and diplomatic relations.
“We are today establishing peace in the Caucasus,” Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev said. “We lost a lot of years being preoccupied with wars and occupation and bloodshed.”
