Many have alleged that the statements and press releases coming out of the Trump White House leave much to be desired.
Starting with spell check.
Since the beginning, Trump’s misspellings on Twitter have been about as common as racist dog-whistling: Remember the possible Freudian slip “unpresidented”? His accusation that Obama would “tapp” his phones? And what human alive missed “Covfefe”? But goofs on occasionally very simple words have proven to be contagious, as HuffPost observed. Most recently, an event description on the White House livestream touted a briefing by the “President’s Commission on Combating Drug Addiction and Opiod Crisis.”
Several pointed out the error on Twitter: It’s “opiod.”
The malady affects a wide cross-section of Trump’s administration, including those charged with official press statements, social media posts and marketing materials. For example, the president’s official inauguration poster claimed “no challenge is to great.”
The red check marks are so legion that the New York Daily News has been keeping track of administration typos. In what would qualify as a vintage outtake from The Far Side, the White House Snapchat referred to “Secretary of Educatuon Betsy DeVos” in April. Press releases about the visit of British prime minister Theresa May misspelled her name three times as “Teresa May,” a porn star. A May press release proclaimed that Trump would “promote the possibility of lasting peach” in the Middle East.
HuffPost noted that Seth Masket, who worked in the White House Office of Correspondence in the ’90s, wrote in Pacific Standard in June that he was shocked by the volume of typos in the Trump era, because the White House “is a venerable and highly professionalized organization with a great deal of institutional memory.” He recounted that during his White House days, each piece of official communication went through at least four rounds of edits. “It’s actually difficult to produce errors like this under normal conditions,” he wrote.“Maybe there just aren’t enough political staffers to do the job right, or maybe people who do the typesetting have quit and not been replaced,” he speculated. “This would be consistent with what we’ve seen in many other areas of this administration.”
