President Donald Trump flubbed geopolitics in his first informal exchange with reporters in his second term as president in the Oval Office.
This came as Trump signed a massive flurry of new executive actions, including to withdraw from the World Health Organization and to pardon roughly 1,500 people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.
“President Trump several times says that Spain is a BRICS nation, referring to the global coalition that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa,” reported The Washington Post’s Matt Viser, who added a swift fact check. “It does not include Spain.”
BRICS began not so much as an actual alliance of nations as a list of countries that economists considered to have broadly the same types of fast-growing trends in the early 2000s. While these countries still notionally meet for summits, the alliance is more on paper than anything substantive, according to analysts.
Trump has been known for making bizarrely incorrect proclamations about politics and history.
In 2019, he infamously remarked that George Washington’s army seized airports from the British, an impossibility as the Revolutionary War took place over 100 years before the invention of powered aircraft.
