President Donald Trump is well known for losing his train of thought and wandering off script during public appearances, and he lived up to that reputation again late last week when a routine White House event took an unexpected turn after the president drifted into a strange aside that left plenty of observers shaking their heads.
It happened Thursday, March 5, at the White House, where Trump was hosting soccer superstar Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami teammates to celebrate the club’s 2025 Major League Soccer Cup championship.
While praising the team and their athletic abilities, Trump suddenly began rambling about the deadly U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Tehran.
He started off clearly enough, repeatedly looking down at his cue cards.
“They’re tough and they want to fight, and they’re calling. They’re saying, how do we make a deal?” Trump boasted, referring to the Iranians who tell a different version of events.
“I said, ‘you’re being a little bit late.’ And we want to fight now more than they do,” he continued as members of the soccer team flanked him in the East Room.
But during Trump’s appearance with the soccer team the president suddenly veered off and made a statement that made no sense at all.
“We’ve had 47 years, depending on the way you count it, but 47 years of horror with this group. And you know when you see somebody walking down the street without their legs, without their arms, whose face is so badly affected and hurt,” Trump said as his audience somehow managed to keep a straight face while simultaneously trying to figure out what he was even talking about even if they did tie the 47 years reference to the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Social media offered no comfort, mercilessly going after him, for hijacking another event with more senseless rabbling and little regard for the company he was in.
“How the f**k can you walk down the street with no legs!” X poster PJ Garcia declared.
Another poster agreed, “Wait..wtf? ‘walking’ without legs? He’s insane. How can anyone keep a straight face standing behind him.
“‘…walking…without their legs…’ is that like doing a hand stand without any arms? Just asking,” this X poster wondered.
X user Mayra reposted a clip of Trump’s absurd remark with just a number and three words. “#25th Amendment Right NOW!”
The wording of the 25th Amendment’s Article II, Section 4, leaves open the possibility of removing a president who is unfit for office, although it’s never been used before.
But poster Linda Stevens may have put it best: “Trump is delusional and nuts. The @GOP has abandoned the American people in its lust and greed for power.”
In less than a week, since Trump, along with Israel, launched airstrikes on Iran on Saturday, Feb. 28, six American service members have been killed in an Iranian drone attack on a port in Kuwait.
And while Trump is claiming he’s receiving calls to make a deal, Iran’s foreign minister says otherwise.
In an interview on “NBC Nightly News” later that day, Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi, rebutted Trump’s claims, saying in part, “Negotiate with the U.S. when we negotiated with them twice, and every time they attacked us in the middle of negotiations? So there is no request for a ceasefire by us, and there is no request for the negotiation with the U.S. from us.”
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Iran’s Red Crescent says the death toll in Trump’s bombing campaign inside Iran has reached at least 1,000, according to PBS.
Both Trump and his henchmen, including Republican lawmakers, continue to give vague and shifting explanations for the ongoing attack and the endgame. Trump first said it was about regime change in the Islamic Republic, then he said it was about preventing Tehran from ever developing a nuclear weapon.
Defense chief Pete Hegseth has absurdly said it’s about “protecting Americans” and taking out the Iranians’ ballistic missile systems. Meantime, the violence has begun rippling across the Middle East as Iran fires drones and bombs at U.S. allies in the region including Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Azerbaijan.
