In an interview with the New York Times on Wednesday, after suggesting that he might not defend another member of the NATO alliance in the event of a Russian attack, Donald Trump was asked if he was paying close attention to what was happening in Turkey following the failed coup attempt last week.

Trump replied that he had been impressed by the efforts of the Turkish people, who took to the streets to prevent the military from seizing power — but he did so in a way that demonstrated his ignorance about a central facet of what took place last Friday night.

“They came out on the streets,” Trump said, according to the transcript, “and the army types didn’t want to drive over them like they did in Tiananmen Square when they sort of drived them over, and that was the end of that. Right? People said, ‘I’m not going to drive over people.’”

In this brief comment, Trump managed to be completely wrong about both what took place in Turkey last week and the backstory to an iconic image from the 1989 protests in China.

In fact, while many reports from Turkey featured images of protesters standing in front of tanks — evoking the heroism of the anonymous “tank man” who tried to stop the military assault on Tiananmen Square three decades ago — there was also graphic visual evidence that tanks in some places ran down protesters and killed them.