Trump Claims American-Born Orlando Shooter Is From “Afghan,” Which Isn’t A Country

Shortly after presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton delivered a sober, somber and tonally appropriate speech regarding the aftermath of the heinous Orlando shootings, it was Donald Trump’s turn to mouth-fart a bunch of Islamophobic gibberish and bigoted word salad. And, despite using a teleprompter, he still couldn’t help himself when it came to screwing up a basic fact that his team tried to prevent.

Yep, besides ad-libbing “bigly,” because why wouldn’t he, the former reality TV star turned potential leader of the free world stated that shooter Omar Mateen was “born in Afghan,” in an effort to justify his Muslim ban. Of course, Mateen was actually born in New York.

Video is below:

Here’s the video of Trump – “The killer… was born an Afghan, of Afghan parents.” He was actually born in New York https://t.co/QV0tgPZfCq

— Zach Wolf (@zbyronwolf) June 13, 2016

To recount, beyond getting the fact that Mateen was born in America wrong, he also seems to believe that Afghan is a country. (For the record, Afghanistan is the name of the country, in case you are Donald Trump and reading this post.)

Now, there appears to be a bit of disagreement among those covering the speech regarding whether he said “born AN Afghan” or “born IN Afghan.” Listening to it myself, it definitely seems like he says the word ‘in,’ but your mileage may vary. Either way, it is definitively wrong.

The really interesting part of this whole story is that Trump added that in himself. The prepared remarks that were made available show that it wasn’t written that way, and instead showed that he was merely supposed to say that Mateen born to Afghan parents, which is true.

It looks like Trump’s “born an Afghan” lie about Orlando shooter was ad libbed. From the prepared text: pic.twitter.com/ZU5ZuYjxkv

— Greg Sargent (@ThePlumLineGS) June 13, 2016

Later on in his speech, Trump also claimed, multiple times, that he’d be a great friend to the “LBGT community.” Usually, friends get names of their friends right, but whatever. (Stacey Dash, unsurprisingly, made the same error in a tweet the day before.)

Anyway, if you missed the speech, count yourself as one of the lucky ones.