President Donald Trump on Wednesday confused a current American adversary for a long-ago foe when he mistakenly told reporters that U.S. aircraft carriers had come under fire from Japanese forces during a bilateral meeting with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky.
The 80-year-old American president was in the midst of a freewheeling impromptu press conference alongside the Ukrainian leader when he began extolling the virtues of American defensive weaponry after what he said was an attack on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln.
“We had 111 missiles shot by the Islamic Republic of Japan. They were shot at the aircraft carrier over a period of about one hour. 111 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,” he said.
The president appeared to have meant to reference an attack against the American carrier by Iranian forces earlier this year, but instead attributed the attack to Japan — a country that has not fired a shot in anger against the United States in nearly a century.
The Japanese armed forces once menaced American aircraft carriers and other naval assets during World War II, but after the U.S. defeated Japan in 1945 the two countries became close allies and remain so today.
Moreover, modern Japan is a constitutional monarchy with no official religion and a tiny Muslim population numbering an estimated 420,000 — with just ten percent of those being ethnic Japanese and the rest being foreign residents.
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