It's no secret that the leader of the free world's use of Twitter has turned American politics into a joke. As you've probably seen by now, the Internet is currently littered with covfefe memes originating from one of Trump's nonsensical late night tweets, "Despite the constant negative press covfefe." The tweet was left up for six hours until Trump presumably woke up and tweeted "Who can figure out the true meaning of 'covfefe'??? Enjoy!"
While the Internet raced to try to define the term, Trump seemed to be trying to type "coverage" and misspelled it as he often does. But wait, it gets better! When asked about the incident, White House press secretary Sean Spicer responded,"The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant."
What...? Literally what? It would have been just as easy for Spicer to say it was a typo, but no. He claimed it to be some kind of inside joke rather than negligence and recklessness straight from the hands of our President to our timelines. This is not abnormal behavior for Trump, who tends to spend much of his time in isolation watching TV and tweeting. The more he does it, the more the Internet jokes about it, which normalizes such childish and generally unprofessional behavior.
When Trump was elected last fall, the not-so-funny joke on 4chan was that the United States had “elected a meme as president.” With more and more Trump memes popping up across the web, this has never felt truer — our entire political climate feels like a dark comedy. While many people on social media are attempting to add an element of levity to an already depressing situation, I frankly don't find Trump's blatant stupidity amusing.
The man in the highest position of power in our country can't own up to his own mistakes, even when it's a simple typo. According to The New York Times, his aides have been "trying to keep him off Twitter and away from TV during Comey testimony," like a preteen who has to be kicked off their smartphone at bedtime. Each time President Trump unleashes an inflammatory 140-character tweet, the media goes wild, which takes attention away from his policy changes in favor of discussing his ridiculous use of social media.
His lack of discipline when tweeting despite how many lawyers, staffers, and aids have begged him to stop, only further proves that nobody can tell Trump what to do. He is a 70-year-old man who, against all odds and doing everything traditional politics says not to, has become excessively powerful. His ignorance, carelessness, and unwillingness to change is far from funny, and as Trump would inarticulately put it himself, it's sad!
