CNN's Don Lemon's panel brutally fact-check President Donald Trump after he made a false claim in an off the wall cabinets meeting on Wednesday.
During a meeting, Trump appeared to defend the Soviet Union.
“The reason Russia was in Afghanistan was that terrorists were going into Russia,” Trump told the press. “They were right to be there. The problem is, it was a tough fight.”
Lemon's panel explained why Trump's opinion on the Soviet Union is extremely "problematic."
"Can you please provide a brief history lesson for this president?" Lemon asked The New Yorker's, Susan Glasser.
"Historians may look back on this as the 63 seconds that brought them to their knees when it came to Donald Trump. He's often ahistorical, but today's rant, which included both appearing to endorse the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and flash forward a decade, claiming that the Afghan war was the reason for the collapse of the Soviet Union are both wrong monumentally when it comes to the historical record," she said.
"Trump's own government, the U.S. State Department, just published a 954-page history of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December that he would have been well advised to check before making this claim," she said.
National security analyst Steve Hall said that he has no idea why Trump would make such an outrageous claim.
"God only knows why the president says what it is that he says. It's difficult to explain how wrong that is because of the motivations involved. I mean the Soviet Union was trying for world domination. Russia is trying to reassert itself on the geopolitical scene despite the fact that it's a small economy," Hall said.
He added, "But these equivalencies are very problematic because anytime you hold up the United States and its values and what it stands for as well as our western allies to things that Russia and the Soviet Union did in the past, that comparison does not stand up well. I have no idea why the president would try to do something like that."
Watch the panel discussion below via CNN.
