Former President Donald Trump has been mocked online after appearing to confuse the names of an Alaskan wildlife refuge with a military air base in Afghanistan.
The Republican presidential nominee made the remarks on Tuesday while discussing his energy policies at a town hall in Flint, Michigan. Arkansas governor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders moderated the event.
During the town hall, Trump appeared to mix up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, which he opened up to oil and gas development during his presidency, with the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.
The gaffe triggered renewed concerns that the 78-year-old is too old to run for the presidency and lacks the cognitive ability for office, with one critic on social media calling him “clueless.” President Joe Biden, 81, faced similar concerns before he ended his reelection bid in July, making Trump the oldest presidential nominee in U.S. history.
Trump said on Tuesday: “We were energy independent, we were soon going to be energy dominant, and we would’ve been now having so much money coming out of the energy. We just have the best.
“We have Bagram in Alaska. They say it might be as big, might be bigger than, all of Saudi Arabia. I got it approved. Ronald Reagan couldn’t do it. Nobody could do it. I got it done.”
Trump seemed to realize his mistake but gave a mumbled response while trying to correct himself.
“Check that one out, Bagram. Check that one out. It’s, it’s—no, think about this: Between Bagram, between—you go to ANWR, you take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up. We should be—we should have that air base. We should have that oil.”
In September 2023, the Biden administration canceled the remaining ANWR oil and gas leases granted during the Trump administration as part of its plans to protect 13 million acres of wilderness. The Bagram Air Base fell to the Taliban in 2021 following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Trump has frequently condemned Biden for the withdrawal after 13 American service members died during an attack at Kabul airport.
A number of Trump’s critics have now ridiculed the former president for his apparent mix-up.
“Bagram was the airbase he had in Afghanistan—the same base where we kept hundreds of Taliban and ISIS prisoners that Trump released back out into Afghanistan in his final year in office,” Amy McGrath, a former Democratic political candidate in Kentucky and former Marine fighter pilot, wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “He is CLUELESS folks.”
Zac Petkanas, a former senior adviser for Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, wrote: “Looking forward to the dozen NYT stories about Trump’s age and mental acuity. Oh wait. That’s just reserved for Democrats.”
Bradley P. Moss, a lawyer who specializes in national security, wrote: “This is elder abuse. Sleepy Don doesn’t even know where he is anymore. He doesn’t even know if he is alive.”
Columnist and reporter Justin Baragona added: “The thing is, you can’t even really give him the benefit of the doubt that he just confused two things that sound a bit alike. ANWR and Bagram aren’t similar phonetically at all.”
Newsweek has contacted Trump’s office for comment via email.
Elsewhere during the town hall, Trump defended his often rambling public speeches while dismissing Vice President Kamala Harris’ comment at the pair’s recent presidential debate that people leave his rallies early “out of exhaustion and boredom.”
Trump said that “everybody stays till the end” of his rallies, adding, “I give these long, sometimes very complex sentences and paragraphs, but they all come together.”
In a statement, a Trump spokesperson previously told Newsweek: “Nobody is leaving our rallies, whereas Kamala needs to bus in people to her events and use curtains to cover up large sections of her rallies because they are so poorly attended.”