Donald Trump Doesn’t Quite Know the Difference Between the ‘Kurds’ and the ‘Quds’
After signing the RNC’s loyalty pledge on Thursday afternoon, Donald Trump called into the radio show of conservative host Hugh Hewitt, who will serve as one of the moderators at this month’s GOP debate on CNN.
Their conversation began with this exchange in what ended up sounding a lot like the foreign policy version of “Who’s on First?”:
HH: Are you familiar with General Soleimani?
DT: Yes… but go ahead, give me a little, go ahead, tell me.
HH: He runs the Quds Forces.
DT: Yes, okay, right.
HH: Do you expect his behavior —
DT: The Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated by —
HH: No, not the Kurds, the Quds Forces, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Forces, the bad guys.
DT: Yes, yes. Right.
HH: Do you expect his behavior to change as a result…
DT: Oh, I thought you said Kurds, Kurds.
HH: No, Quds.
DT: Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you said Kurds, because I think the Kurds have been poorly treated by us, Hugh. Go ahead.
Asked if he thinks General Soleimani’s behavior will change with the Iran nuclear deal, Trump went off on tangent about how “incompetent” the deal is without answering the question at hand.
Soon, Hewitt was asking Trump to weigh in on Hassan Nasrallah, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Abu Mohammad al-Julani and Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. “Do you know the players without a scorecard, yet, Donald Trump?” he asked.
On this point, Trump admitted that he did not, but only because “by the time we get to office, they’ll all be changed, they’ll be all gone.”
“As far as the individual players, of course I don’t know them,” Trump added. “I’ve never met them. I haven’t been, you know, in a position to meet them.” (Neither has anyone else in the U.S. government, but that’s apparently irrelevant.) “If, if they’re still there, which is unlikely in many cases, but if they’re still there, I will know them better than I know you.”
And a few moments later, Trump was back to saying things like, “I will be so good at the military, your head will spin.” When Hewitt insisted he wasn’t trying to ask Trump “gotcha” questions, the GOP frontrunner replied, “Well, it sounded like gotcha. You’re asking me names that — I think it’s somewhat ridiculous, but that’s okay.”
If Trump thought Megyn Kelly’s questions were tough, he is definitely going to need to do some homework before this month’s debate.
Listen to audio below, via The Hugh Hewitt Show:
[Photo via screengrab]
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