AKIPRESS.COM - Joshua Boyle’s life had descended into a surreal, five-year nightmare — but one thing was still beyond belief.

Boyle and his pregnant wife had been kidnapped by affiliates of the Taliban on a trip to Afghanistan in 2012. The captors had later killed his infant daughter, he said, and raped his wife, who described the ordeal as a “Kafka-esque nightmare.” Sometime late last year, the couple were about to make a video to show their loved ones that they were, in fact, still alive, Washington Post reported.

But surely one captor was lying, Boyle believed, when he said that Donald Trump had been elected leader of the free world.

“It didn’t enter my mind that he was being serious,” Boyle, a Canadian national, told the Toronto Star a week after being rescued.

The last time Boyle had unfettered access to a news source that wasn’t an armed kidnapper, Trump was a presidential pretender who had flirted with formally entering the 2012 race.

His top issue at the time appeared to be whether President Barack Obama was, in fact, born in the United States. But Trump later announced that he was tabling his political aspirations and focusing on his business empire and his reality TV show.

“Business is my greatest passion and I am not ready to leave the private sector,” Trump said when he made the announcement in 2011, according to the Guardian newspaper.

A poll conducted at the time showed that 71 percent of people thought that Trump had no chance of becoming president — including, apparently, a Canadian call center operator who was pining to help people in remote regions of Afghanistan.