'Islamic Republic of Japan'? Trump's Viral Slip Has Internet Asking, 'Does Japan Even Know?'

In what can only be described as a full geopolitical fever dream, Donald Trump stood beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the NATO summit in Ankara on July 8 and casually invented a brand new nation. Speaking about Iran's missile attack on a US aircraft carrier, Trump announced that "we had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan ," seamlessly merging Tokyo and Tehran into one confused Frankenstein nation that exists nowhere except inside the president's head.

For context, Japan does not have an Islamic Republic. Japan has sushi, bullet trains, and a state religion situation that leans heavily Shinto and Buddhist. Iran, meanwhile, actually is the Islamic Republic in question, the one Trump was presumably trying to talk about before his brain took a scenic detour through East Asia.

But Japan wasn't the only casualty of the day. Trump also looked directly at Zelenskyy and asked reporters if they had a question for " President Putin ," seemingly forgetting which war torn nation's president he was literally sitting next to. He then referred to the JCPOA, the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as the " JCPOC ," calling it a terrible deal, which is at least consistent because he calls everything a terrible deal. For dessert, he mispronounced TikTok as "tic tac," presumably confusing a Chinese owned app with a breath mint.

Naturally, the internet did what the internet does best, which is roast a sitting president with the aircraft carrier missile attack still fresh in everyone's mind. One user predicted that MAGA would "find some way to make this make sense in their head," which, to be fair, is basically their full time unpaid job at this point. Another simply noted that "this guy would fail 2nd grade social studies," a review so brutal even the aircraft carrier flinched. Someone else greeted the confusion with "As salamu alaykum senpai," blending two entirely different cultures with more grace than Trump managed in real time.

Others went darker, joking that he was "working his way to an unfit for trial plea," while one commenter suggested Trump "has miso and noodles in his brain," which honestly explains a lot about foreign policy these days. A more sincere voice asked, "does Japan even know this," a fair question given Japan is a treaty ally and not, historically, the country that fired 111 missiles at a US aircraft carrier.

The sharpest jab pointed out the irony of Trump's own attacks on Joe Biden 's verbal slips, with one user writing that Trump warned Biden's dementia would "harm the world," except now his own words are the ones rattling global stability. Another simply marveled, "wonderful, this man has nuclear codes," a sentence that reads like satire but is, unfortunately, just current events. And in the ultimate mic drop, someone renamed the whole country outright, joking that the United States should just be called the "United States of Israel" at this point, given how the administration's Middle East priorities have been playing out.

The White House, for its part, did not address the Japan comment directly. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt instead praised Trump's "marathon, high energy performance" at the summit, which is certainly one way to describe accidentally starting a diplomatic incident with a country that was not involved in the attack it was blamed for.