Donald Trump just announced new sanctions against a guy who’s been dead for thirty years

| 7:07 pm EDT June 24, 2019
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If you’ve been getting the sense that Donald Trump is even more off his game than ever, and that his increasingly depleted White House staff is even less competent than ever, you’re not just imagining it; there’s a definite pattern playing out in plain sight. Trump has been completely botching the Iran “crisis” in erratic fashion ever since he manufactured it – and today he took things to an inept new low.

Donald Trump announced today in front of the cameras that he’ll be placing new sanctions on Iran, and that “assets of Ayatollah Khomeini” will be included in these sanctions. The trouble: Ayatollah Khomeini has been dead for thirty years. Trump was apparently trying to refer to the current Ayatollah, whose name is Khamenei. The two names are similar, but this is not the kind of thing that it’s okay for the President of the United States to get wrong, particularly when he’s in the process of trying to take (or fake) a bold stand against Iran.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Donald Trump’s handlers put the wrong name in his prepared statement to begin with, or if Trump simply looked at the correct name and got it wrong. It’s also unclear if Trump was trying to say the name of the current Ayatollah and mispronounced it, or if he thinks the former Ayatollah is still alive, or if he even knows the difference. Either way, it was fairly clear that Trump had never seen the statement before he read it for the cameras.

This is during the course of a day in which Trump was more erratic on Twitter than ever, misspelling “strait” while attacking China, and misspelling the word “too” because he’s just that illiterate. But we think sanctioning a dead guy takes the cake. This might be Trump’s most humiliating international flub since he appeared to state on Twitter several months ago that Kim Jong-Un, who is currently in his thirties, has been in power for several decades.