Donald Trump meets with President of Finland, doesn’t appear to know his name

| 8:58 pm EDT August 28, 2017
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In the midst of deadly flooding in Texas in the wake of Hurricane Harvey, and a severe escalation of the Trump-Russia scandal, today saw Donald Trump holding a joint press conference with the President of Finland. And while that’s all well and good, it appeared Trump did no prep work for the meeting whatsoever, and in fact didn’t even seem to know the name of the world leader he was meeting with.

The President of Finland is Sauli Niinistö, and that information alone will make you more knowledgable about him than Donald Trump is. During the course of a lengthy joint press conference which aired on live television today, Donald Trump made numerous references to the man standing next to him. But in each instance he merely referred to him as “The President” without even so much as once mentioning his name. That suggests that at best Trump was afraid to say the words “President Niinistö” because he didn’t know how to pronounce it, and at worst he didn’t even know what the guy’s name was. But it got worse.

There were other lowlights during the joint press conference. President Niinistö made a far more sincere effort to reassure the people trapped in Houston’s flooding than Donald Trump did. When Niinistö went on to speak about the dangers of climate change, Trump just stood there uncomfortably and seemed to wince. The only topic Trump seemed to enjoy speaking about was his recent pardon of racist criminal Joe Arpaio, and he made a point of bragging that he announced the pardon during Hurricane Harvey so he could get the best “ratings.” Yes, he actually said that during a joint press conference with the President of Finland.

For Donald Trump’s sake it was probably a good thing that with so much else going on, relatively few people bothered to watch his embarrassing performance today. But the bad news for Trump is that far more people were paying attention to the series of bombshells about how he was secretly trying to build a Trump Tower in Moscow during the election.