In 1991, Donald Trump filed for bankruptcy for the first time. He is said to have posed as his own publicist in a phone interview. He judged a “Look of the Year” modeling event, whose contestants reportedly included teenage girls as young as 14. His friendship with Jeffrey Epstein was still in bloom.
And the Soviet Union was on its last legs: 1991 was the year it would dissolve. It was also the last year the Russian city now known as St. Petersburg would be called Leningrad.
It was this time to which the president’s mind apparently strayed on Wednesday morning, when he accidentally referred to St. Petersburg by its former name in a social media post.
Trump had taken to Truth Social to disparage the media for covering criticisms of his impending summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. The choice to hold the meeting in Alaska had drawn critics, among them Trump’s onetime national security adviser John Bolton, who told CNN: “The only better place for Putin than Alaska would be if the summit were being held in Moscow. So the initial setup, I think, is a great victory for Putin.”
The president reprimanded the press for reporting on this, and for “constantly quoting fired losers and really dumb people” like Bolton.
“Very unfair media is at work on my meeting with Putin,” Trump said. So unfair, he wrote, that, “if I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!”
It’s unclear what “freeing” those cities would mean, even in the context of this hyperbolic hypothetical.
Anyway, many observers were quick to note the “Leningrad” slip—which, to be sure, was still not as egregious as a gaffe, also regarding the upcoming summit, that the president had made two days earlier, when he incorrectly stated twice that it was taking place in Russia. (If the president’s Wednesday post was a 34-year throwback to 1991, his Monday remarks turned back the clock over a century and a half, to when Alaska was still Russian territory.)
Also in Wednesday morning’s Truth Social post, Trump wrote, “The Fake News is working overtime (No tax on overtime!)”—offering a written example of his (usually verbal) tendency to “weave,” as the 79-year-old president likes to call his free-association-style rambling.
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