There is no Russian city called Leningrad anymore, but apparently no one bothered to tell Donald Trump.
The 79-year-old president had yet another senior citizen moment as part of a Truth Social diatribe Tuesday morning, triggering a wave of concern about his cognitive faculties.
“If I got Moscow and Leningrad free, as part of the deal with Russia, the Fake News would say that I made a bad deal!” Trump wrote in a post in which he complained about the media’s coverage of his upcoming summit with Vladimir Putin.
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Critics were quick to point out that Leningrad’s name was changed in 1991, when the city’s residents voted via referendum to bring back its historic name of St. Petersburg.
Many saw the moment as a sign that Trump is possibly suffering from dementia.
Others remembered that around the time of Leningrad’s renaming, Trump was desperate to extend his real-estate empire to Russia.
In 1987, Trump and his wife Ivana traveled to Moscow to tour construction sites for a potential Trump Hotel in the Russian capital. They also spent time in Leningrad, four years before its renaming.
“Trump mentioning Leningrad is wild, considering the city hasn’t existed since 1991,” wrote one user. “He’s long gone at this point.”
Those plans fizzled, but Trump continued to court developers in Russia and even allowed the Miss Universe pageant to be held in Moscow in 2013.
To be clear, Trump means getting a free Trump hotel in Moscow and St.Petersburg (formerly Leningrad)
— Michael McDonald (@electproject.bsky.social) August 13, 2025 at 8:38 AM
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The Truth Social gaffe comes two days before Trump is set to meet with Putin in Alaska to discuss Ukraine’s future, at a summit where he will certainly need to muster all of his cognitive strength.
On Wednesday, author Michael Wolff recounted on The Daily Beast’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast that after Trump met one-on-one with Vladimir Putin in 2018, he emerged looking “like a beaten dog.”
Trump has seemed to lose the plot several times in the last few weeks.
In July, he criticized Joe Biden for appointing Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, forgetting he picked Powell himself in 2017.
The day before that incident, he confabulated a story about how his uncle, an MIT professor, had taught Ted Kaczynski before he was the “Unabomber.” Kaczynski never attended MIT.
On Monday, he left press secretary Karoline Leavitt to clean up his mess after claiming twice that he would be traveling to Russia on Friday—instead of Alaska, where the summit with Putin is actually being held.
A White House spokesperson wrote the following statement, in part: “Joe Biden started this brutal war, and President Trump is trying to stop the killing.”
The war started when Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022. The invasion came days after President Biden warned that Putin was preparing to attack, and threatened to impose economic sanctions.
“Perhaps there are plans in the future to travel to Russia,” Leavitt said on Monday after Trump’s last Russia gaffe.
Whether those travel plans will include a stop in historic Leningrad is currently unclear.
