'Sleepy Don' Trump vows to regain Afghan airbase Bagram but confuses it with Alaska's wildlife park

Former US President Donald Trump faced a barrage of jokes and mockery after he confused the names of an Alaskan wildlife refuge and an air base in Afghanistan. Trump’s latest gaffe came while he was participating in a town hall in Michigan on Tuesday.

The former president appeared on stage for the event which was moderated by his former White House press secretary and current Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders. The business-mogul-turned-politician did not stop there. Trump went on to claim that “only consequential presidents get shot at," referring to the two assassination attempts against him.

Trump made the blunder while he was boasting about his administration getting drilling approval in Alaska’s oil-rich Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). However, instead of taking the name of the swathe of mountains and forest in the Last Frontier, he took the name of Bagram Airfield, the former largest US air base in Afghanistan, which is now in the hands of the Taliban.

“Check that one out. Bagram. Check that one. ANW… it’s, it’s… no, think about this,” Trump said, tripping over his words. “Between Bagram, between… you go to ANWR…” It is still not clear how and why Trump mixed up the two locations which are phonetically different and are on separate continents.

Trump pledges to regain control over the Bagram airbase

After the gaffe, Trump also pledged to regain control of the Afghan air base, if he comes back to power.

“You take a look at the kind of things that we’ve given up, uh, we should be, we should have that air base we should have that oil, we should have, we would have had a whole different country, but to give up … to give up the biggest airbase military airbase in the world, and they left it — behind but we would have been, we would have been, we would have been a much different country right now but we’re going to get it back and I promise you we’re going to get it back,” he said.

While addressing the town hall, the former president also overinflated the size of the Alaskan wildlife refuge before claiming his controversial oil-drilling deal secured just days before the end of his presidency in 2021 – a deal that was swiftly culled by the Biden administration.

“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,” Trump averred. “We just have the best. We have Bagram in Alaska,” he added.

He went boast about how former US President Ronald Reagan couldn’t get the deal he got. “They say it might be as big… it 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 bragged.

While Trump claimed that ANWR is “bigger” than Saudi Arabia, the refuge spans across approximately 78,000 sq km. The Middle Eastern country, on the other hand, covers about 2,150,000 sq km.

The backlash that followed

The former president became the butt of the joke soon after his blunder. “They say it might be bigger than Saudi Arabia, they also say it’s in Afghanistan, not Alaska,” former professor at the US Naval War College-turned staff writer at The Atlantic Tom Nichols quipped, as he shared a clip of Trump speaking at the town hall on X, formerly known as Twitter.

“Bagram was the airbase he [Trump] 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, the former Marine fighter pilot and founder of the Democratic Majority Action PAC, wrote in her post.

Trump’s gaffe was also trolled by the hosts of MSNBC’s Morning Joe on TV. “Check it out, Willie. You got your Google machine?” anchor Joe Scarborough teased. “Bagram, Alaska. I hear there is some of the best moose hunting in all of the world in Bagram.”

“Not a slip of the tongue either,” co-host Willie Geist chimed in. “He said it five or six times and then closed it with check it, Google it, find it, look it up, take it to the bank," he added.

Zac Petkanas, a former senior adviser for Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent, also took jabs at the former president.  “Looking forward to the dozen NYT stories about Trump’s age and mental acuity. Oh, wait. That’s just reserved for Democrats.”

The latest gaffe from Trump triggered renewed concerns about his age. There were questions if the 78-year-old was too old to run for the presidency and lacked the cognitive ability for office. While recalling how Trump used to refer to US President Joe Biden as “sleepy Joe,” many referred to the former reality TV star as “sleepy don”.

With inputs from agencies.