What’s worse: President Trump’s history of egregious spelling errors, or the gaggle of media personalities who try to turn poor spelling into a scandalous offense? If you want Trump out of office, the answer is certainly the latter.
It almost seems as if the media wants to keep impeachment approval ratings from growing, as some journalists have been working overtime not to investigate any of Trump’s actual missteps, but to discredit him with the fatal blow of … typos on his Twitter account.
Over the weekend, CNN’s Brian Stelter dedicated an entire segment to a scathing takedown of Trump and his sloppy tweeting. Stelter, who claimed this summer that “the president’s hateful tweets make journalists less safe,” argued, “if he can’t get the small stuff right, people worry about the big stuff.”
For people who were on the fence before, this deep dive into the spelling expertise of the commander in chief will surely change their minds.
“On average, Trump makes a spelling error at least one out of every five days,” Stelter explained gravely, adding that Trump has made more than 188 spelling errors on Twitter since taking office. Incidentally, the screen Stelter references reads “misspelling errors,” which, as a double negative, means Trump is pretty great at spelling. Yet there’s no mention from Stelter on CNN’s own grammatical failings.
Stelter then compares Trump to Barack Obama, claiming that since Trump took office, the former president has made zero spelling errors. “Well, this says it all,” he concludes unironically. This makes sense because, as we’ve been told by CNN, Obama’s administration was scandal-free.
In the abstract, a president who doesn’t know capital from the Capitol is pretty funny. At least, it would be if the media could stop pretending that spelling errors are somehow a threat.
“It’s actually not that funny,” Stelter warns, in case you were inclined to find any mirth in the situation. “I know English teachers are horrified by the president’s poor form.”
Oh no. Not the English teachers!
Actually, a lot of English teachers would likely dock Stelter’s grade for such a hyperbolic reading of the source material.
Unable to explain why spelling errors matter so much, Stelter says, “It gets this deeper issue about his inaccuracy. Of course, some of his aides claim that the misspellings make him authentic. I just think his English teachers would have flunked him for that excuse.”
Ah, if only his English teachers had flunked him in high school, we might not have Drumpf today.
Stelter, who shared a seemingly anti-Trump H. L. Mencken quote this spring, might want to ignore the journalist’s inconvenient quote about spelling: “Correct spelling, indeed, is one of the arts that are far more esteemed by schoolma’ams than by practical men, neck-deep in the heat and agony of the world.”
Nevertheless, Trump’s Twitter has become the latest campaign of the #Resistance.
Over the weekend, the New York Times published “9 key takeaways” from “Trump’s Twitter presidency.” The article noted — before the banal “scoop” that he might not tweet in public because he doesn’t want people to see him in glasses — that some of the accounts he follows on Twitter follow bad accounts.
This, presumably, reflects poorly on Trump. Did the authors stretch before making that reach?
For his part, Trump knows the media is losing its mind over his Twitter. To him, it is funny.
One of his most famous typos came in the now-deleted tweet, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” To confound the media’s bewilderment, he added hours later, “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ??? Enjoy!”
There is no “true meaning,” but that won’t stop CNN and the New York Times for looking for one. So Trump will continue to send the media after red herrings, tweeting as he did Monday morning: “But how do you know it was a ‘mistweet?’ May be something with deep meaning!”
