President Trump fired off another tweet that was heard around the world. Ironically, this one went viral not because of outrage but because of a typo. In an apparent misspelling that occurred after midnight this morning, Trump complained about “constant negative press covfefe.”
Predictably journalists and politicos lost their collective minds, hijacking the news cycle over a spelling slip. But Trump’s supporters won’t care, not just because many give the commander in chief a perpetual pass. Plenty of them won’t care because they won’t see it for themselves.
New polling by Pew shows that the digital gap between rural and non-rural Americans, between red counties and blue cities, continues to persist.
While smartphones, laptops, and tablets become more ubiquitous, there’s a lot of America that’s not online. Almost one-third (27 percent) of rural Americans don’t have access to broadband at home, according to Pew, and roughly one-in-five (19 percent) say they never go online at all.
Don’t misunderstand. None of this suggests that rural Trump voters are luddites. Those numbers indicate instead that a portion of the president’s base has better things to do than wait around, breathlessly refreshing Twitter in search of outrage.
And at the same time, none of this suggests that the leader of the free world is above autocorrect. Trump talked about restoring American prestige on the campaign. Clearly this sort of sloppiness isn’t what voters had in mind, a truth reflected in the fact that the majority of Americans want the president to kick his Twitter habit.
Ultimately though, the viral flare-up shouldn’t dominate coverage. Sure, that snarky hot take about how the misspelling encapsulates a failing presidency is easy to write (who knows, it might even have some merit). But chances of that analysis breaking out of the Beltway are slim at best.
Our echo chambers are smaller than we think — also, fewer people use Twitter than you’d expect. And when less tech-savvy Trump supporters read, listen, or watch news about the gaffe, they’re likely to rightly dismiss the hysteria as ridiculous and petty.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
