One of the funniest things about the George W. Bush presidency was that he was surrounded by critics who argued both that he was a bumbling idiot and a master schemer.
It looks like we’re in for more of the same with President Trump.
The Boston Globe published a report this week alleging the president doesn’t write all of his tweets. Moreover, the story claimed, the poor grammar that appears so often on his social media feed is intentional. It’s the work of staffers who are seeking to imitate his style.
The article reads:
Overall, it’s a fascinating read. Where the report gets weird, however, is when it quotes experts who smell a darker, more cunning conspiracy in Trump’s Twitter feed.
“Grammatical conventions tend to be elitist and always have been,” said Society for the Promotion of Good Grammar founder Martha Brockenbrough. “The lack of regard for it, and the fact that he’s now having American tax dollars fund people to ape his style, is meant to poke people like you and me in the eye — people for whom language matters.”
University of Mary Washington in Virginia professor Stephen Farnsworth added, “If the political conversation is about Donald Trump’s typos, that plays into the narrative that the coastal elites don’t understand ordinary Americans who make typos.”
Yale University’s English Department chairman Langdon Hammer added the most ominous warning, saying, “The president’s use of language, like his White House, is chaotic. But that is not necessarily a problem in itself. It’s what he uses language for — the strategic interests served by his sloppiness.”
This feels like overthinking the matter. We’re being told both that Trump has a child’s grasp of the English language, and that he is using it as part of a larger plan to – own the liberals? Occam’s Razor is your friend. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
Trump is a cranky 71-year-old New Yorker. His very unpolished style predates his presidency by many years.
Because he is prone to typing mistakes (see: “great honer,” “leightweight chocker” and “lose cannon with extraordinarily bad judgement & insticts”), his staffers are left with no choice but to do the same. Like all speechwriters, they are trying to capture his voice, typos, and grammatical errors and all.
It’s likely no more complicated than that.
There’s no master plan to stick it to the “elites” with a perfectly placed typo. There’s no conspiracy to undermine long-standing institutions with bad grammar. Like George W. Bush’s many malapropisms, let’s not suspect a larger conspiracy where the explanation is an innocent and easy one.
