Donald Trump is not somebody whose every utterance should be going out into the virtual firmament unexpurgated and unedited, but that’s how it is anyway. Yesterday Trump set America guffawing once again with “Special Council” and “wether” in the same tweet, prompting a retrospective of this administration’s Greatest Gaffes. Washington Post:
In Trump’s world, Air Force One became “Air Force Once” on the president’s public schedule. The White House sought “lasting peach” in a news release touting efforts to broker a deal between Israel and Palestinian territories. And another release announced the departure of an East Wing aide to work for Rep. Will Hurd (R-Tex.), who was reincarnated as Rep. Hill in the next sentence.
Last week, in a tweet, the commander in chief lauded his visit to the “Marine Core Air Station Miramar” in San Diego, prompting “veterans everywhere to facepalm,” according to a headline in the Marine Times.
The twitter errors from the man with the best words are epic, but it’s not just him. it’s everyone around him. Trump staffers have come up with some editorial treasures.
Inside the West Wing, however, it was another mistake in January 2017, by a junior White House aide, that caused the most consternation — just a week after Trump took office. Announcing the visit to the White House of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the official schedule misspelled her name three times as “Teresa May,” which the London-based Independent newspaper drolly noted is the stage name of a British pornographic movie actress whose oeuvre includes “Whitehouse: The Sex Video” and “Leather Lust.”
The mistakes hardly abated. The White House mangled the titles of foreign leaders and their countries. It called Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the “president” of Japan. After Trump held a high-stakes bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in July, the White House readout referred to the “Republic of China,” which is the official name of Taiwan. Xi is the leader of the People’s Republic of China.
This says it all.
In a sign that the sloppiness might be infecting other parts of Washington, tickets to Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress in January, distributed by the Office of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper, touted the “State of the Uniom.”
Irony has died a quiet death and who needs satire when you’ve got this?