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Greg Evans
Aug 02, 2019
Donald Trump's knowledge of history hasn't always been the strongest and he was at it again during another bizarre rally on Thursday, this time in Cincinnati, Ohio.
During a rambling rant where he covered all sorts of subjects such as windmills and curing cancer, Trump decided to give those in attendance a short history lesson on Russia.
In a comment about America being the largest energy provider in the world, which ended as an attack on the 2016 Paris climate agreement, Trump suggested that once upon a time, the people of the Soviet Union woke up one day and decided to change their name to Russia.
We are now the largest energy producer in the world, bigger than Soviet Union, formerly...
Remember the Soviet Union when it was all together, the Soviet Union, when it was all together before they decided, we got to call ourselves Russia.ÂThat was always their dream, to be the biggest in the world. Then it became Russia, and you know what they've done a good job with energy, and so has Saudi Arabia done a good job with energy, but we're now bigger than Russia.ÂWe are now bigger than Saudi Arabia by far and I withdrew our country from the job-killing, very expensive Paris climate accord.
Trump, who isn't exactly unfamiliar with Russia, seems to think that Soviet Union consisted solely of the country that we now know as Russia and not the collective union of the countries that we now call Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania. To be honest we'd be surprised if Trump has heard of half of those countries.
The Soviet Union ultimately collapsed in the late 1980s following a series of revolutions across Eastern Europe which lead to the tearing down of the Berlin wall. In August, 1991, president Mikhail Gorbachev saw his power severely diminished by Communist hard-liners, which helped empower more democratic forces and the ascension of Boris Yeltsin. Gorbachev resigned on Christmas Day 1991 and by the end of that year the Soviet Union was no more. However, Trump doesn't appear to remember any of that.
As you can probably imagine, Trump's alternative history of Russia has led to some ridicule of the president.
More: Trump ranted about how he has power on a level nobody has seen before
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