Donald Trump's biographer told MSNBC host Joy Reid today that the president's "word salad" knowledge of Russia invading Afghanistan suggests he's "someone's puppet."
During his Sunday appearance on AM Joy, "TrumpNation" author Tim O'Brien discussed the possibility of the president being fed inaccurate information about a country whose history he knows very little about.
"We have to wonder why these talking points that are clearly Kremlin talking points end up in Donald Trump's mouth," O'Brien said. "He's probably the most wildly ill-informed and illiterate president we have had in the Oval Office and he would be hard-pressed to find Afghanistan on a map."
He continued: "What's disturbing is when you move past the word salad of it, this sort of tragicomic aspect of Trump when he does this strange performance art is that it's a national security problem."
"You have someone who is the commander in chief and has lots of power to execute policy on behalf of the country overseas—he really doesn't know what he's talking about. And when he does speak, it looks like he's the puppet of other people," the author warned.
O'Brien's comments come after the president argued that the Soviet's invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 was justified and claimed it "bankrupted" Moscow during a Cabinet meeting on Wednesday. Trump also claimed that the move was made to target terrorists entering the Soviet Union.
However the view diverges with what the U.S. believed, which was that the Soviets were attempting to spread communism and expand their influence against the West. And, although the Soviet economy crashed—due to various other factors as well as the Afghanistan invasion—it didn't go bankrupt.
"Russia used to be the Soviet Union. Afghanistan made it Russia because they went bankrupt fighting in Afghanistan. Russia. So you take a look at other countries. Pakistan is there. They should be fighting," Trump said.
"But Russia should be fighting. The reason Russia was in, in Afghanistan was because terrorists were going into Russia. They were right to be there. The problem is it was a tough fight. And literally they went bankrupt. They went into being called Russia again as opposed to the Soviet Union."
Watch the MSNBC segment below:
