Cause For Concern As It Took Trump 87 Minutes to Correct His “Unpresidented” Gaffe

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:42 pm

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Kyle Griffin, producer for MSNBC’s The Last Word, pointed out, “It took Trump and his team 87 minutes to fix the word ‘unpresidented.'”

We are deep in the Trumpian weeds of chaos and distraction with just one tweet, so much so that it’s easy to miss all of the reasons people are horrified. It’s really not just elite liberals upset about having a president who can’t spell, although that is bad enough and certainly we shouldn’t apologize for having standards for the highest office in the land.

This glaring spelling error is problematic in and of itself, as Hrafnkell Haraldsson wrote this morning, “George W. Bush appears, in comparison to Trump, to have been merely a warning shot across the bow of presidential dignity.

Jason Easley pointed out earlier on these pages that Trump’s ongoing spelling challenges are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reasons why he’s unfit to be president. He is also unfit because “he makes up his own facts while being obsessed with his media coverage.”

But there is also the response time problem. Why did it take 87 minutes for an entire team of people to react to this glaring embarrassment?

It seems Secretary Hillary Clinton was right again. This time, her 3 AM phone call ad is a sad reminder to a nation that was easily distracted by our media’s obsession with her emails:

87 minutes to react to a misspelled tweet. I mean, the decision about what to do about a misspelled tweet isn’t that hard. You either write over it with the corrected version (my choice unless caught immediately, because transparency), or you delete it and rewrite it. This is hardly a decision requiring great thought, like taking a call with Taiwan should have been…

… and wasn’t for the Trump team.

“When President-elect Trump triggered Beijing’s wrath by taking a telephone call from Taiwan’s pro-independence leader in early December—threatening four decades of diplomatic stability—the two countries inched closer to the type of incident that could lead to a dangerous string of tit-for-tat reprisals,” Jeff Stein explained in Newsweek Friday morning.

At what point do we call what Donald Trump is doing trolling the electors? Because the fact that he spelled unprecedented in a way that suggested his unprecedented election should be “unpresidented” (as in, Conscious Uncoupling perhaps?) seems like a cry for help. And this isn’t the first time Donald Trump has tried to alert the world that he is not up to this job and doesn’t intend to do it for long.

87 minutes to decide how to handle a misspelled tweet.

Sarah Jones

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Sarah has been credentialed to cover President Barack Obama, then VP Joe Biden, 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and exclusively interviewed Speaker Nancy Pelosi multiple times and exclusively covered her first home appearance after the first impeachment of then President Donald Trump.

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