At a NATO summit press conference in Ankara on July 8, President Trump described a missile attack on the USS Abraham Lincoln by attributing it to a country that, as far as anyone can tell, does not exist: the Islamic Republic of Japan. He appeared to mean the Islamic Republic of Iran, the actual country that fired the missiles. Japan, a longtime U.S. treaty ally that has fired zero missiles at anyone, did not immediately confirm or deny its apparent new government.
This was, notably, not the only mix-up of the afternoon. Minutes later, while standing directly beside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the President asked the assembled press if anyone had a question for “President Putin.” He attempted to recover by clarifying that he simply wanted to relay any Putin-related questions to Putin, which raised more questions than it resolved. He also referred to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal as the “JCPOC” rather than the JCPOA — a small detail on its own, but one that rounds the set out nicely.
Japan’s Foreign Ministry has not commented on its sudden, unscheduled conversion. Iran, for its part, has not commented on being edited out of a sentence about itself. We now have a shirt about it. This is, in fact, where we are as a civilization.
Headline Thread
REPUBLIC
OF JAPAN
The nation the President invented on live television, in front of the actual President of Ukraine, in the time it takes to say one sentence incorrectly. Commemorate the one geopolitical entity in recorded history that existed for exactly the length of a press conference.
Unsolicited Opinions
The Fake News Desk
LOCAL WOMAN REFRESHES TEXT THREAD SEVENTEEN TIMES, STILL CONSIDERS HERSELF “VERY CHILL ABOUT IT”
Tulsa resident Priya Nair, 29, confirmed this week that a friend read her text message at 2:47 PM and has not yet responded, a fact Nair described as “not a big deal” while checking her phone for the eighteenth time in eleven minutes.
“People are busy,” Nair said, opening the thread again to re-confirm the read receipt had not changed. “I’m not sitting here thinking about it. I have a whole life.” She then set a timer to check again in five minutes, “just out of curiosity.”
Friends close to Nair report she has floated several theories, including that her friend’s phone “glitched,” that the message “came across weird,” and that she should “probably just text something normal to smooth it over,” followed immediately by drafting and deleting four different follow-up messages.
As of press time, the original message — “haha yeah no worries!” — remains unanswered. Nair says she has moved on completely and is only still holding her phone because it’s “generally a phone kind of day.”
