Social media are full of people who, under the impression that their political fulminations are witty, spend much of their days collecting likes and retweets from the hordes of barking-seal partisans. And so it was that Yvonne Mason, a retired English teacher in South Carolina, wrote a letter demanding that President Trump visit each of the families that lost a child in the Parkland, Florida, school shooting. Mason, who says her initial letter was written in anger, was further incensed by the letter she received in response from the White House bearing the president’s signature. She deemed the president’s letter poorly written and so “corrected” it as if it were a school assignment and put the marked-up results on Facebook. Mason’s corrected letter went viral—so viral, in fact, that the New York Times deemed it sufficiently newsworthy to publish a story about it.
Now, we readily concede that written products issuing from the Trump White House have sometimes fallen below standards set by previous administrations. Team Trump is known for its typos. But nearly all of Mason’s objections relate to capitalization of nouns, and it turns out the White House style guide specifically calls for capitalizing certain words, for instance “federal,” “state,” and “nation,” depending on the context. Nor, incidentally, do some of Mason’s marginal glosses exemplify the sort of professionalism she believed lacking in the White House letter. “Have y’all tried grammar & style check?” And: “OMG This Is WRONG!”
The Times does eventually get around to pointing out that Mason’s corrections weren’t, well, correct, but somehow still frames the story as if the White House were at fault instead of the schoolmarm.
Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine puts the point more sharply. “Mason’s showy but erroneous pedantry illustrates the tendency of Trump’s opponents to cast policy disagreements as questions of competence and to delight in everything that reflects badly on him, even when that thing is not, strictly speaking, true,” Sullum writes. “These tendencies, which mirror Trump’s own fondness for ad hominem attacks and recklessness with facts, alienate potential allies while confirming his supporters’ conviction that he is sticking it to a supercilious elite that holds them in contempt.”
