US presidential candidate Donald Trump is someone who I think we’ve all probably heard enough about, but there’s something fascinating about the man. He’s a blogger’s dream in a way, because whether you like him or not, he never leaves anyone short of something to write about.
Much of this comes straight from the 70-year-old’s Twitter feed, which is something of a compendium of 140-character insights into what it’s like to be an inherited billionaire with a major chip on his shoulder who wants to send the most powerful nation on earth into a reactionary, ultraconservative black hole.
Trump’s tweets are often baffling and poorly expressed, with confusion at one point arising over whether he thought Paris was in Germany. Just last month, he was involved in a bizarre controversy about the Star of David, in which he, for some reason, turned to Disney’s ‘Frozen’ to splutter his defence.
Mockers of the Republican Party nominee have also drawn attention to his poor spelling. This has included branding his one-time fellow presidential hopeful Marco Rubio a ‘leightweight chocker’ and expressing his ‘honer’ at opinion polls. Last Saturday though, he arguably surpassed all of this with a tweet (now deleted) that included three spelling errors.
Not content with labelling his political nemesis Hillary Clinton a ‘lose cannon’, he also criticises her ‘insticts’. For such a keen American patriot, it’s surprising he chooses the UK English spelling of ‘judgement’ as well. Some observers picked further holes, suggesting that ‘because’ should have been used instead of ‘in that’, while others ignored his spelling goofs altogether and instead commented on the irony of Trump calling anyone a “lose [sic] cannon”.
Most browsers have a spellcheck facility so that any misspellings appear with a red squiggly line under them, although this would still probably not have helped Trump with ‘lose’ and ‘judgement’. Perhaps an old-fashioned dictionary at the side of Trump’s computer may do him good, or he could use his vast wealth to hire a proof reader, thus tackling the unemployment rate of 4.9% in the US at the same time.
Politicians struggling with social media is nothing new. In his time as prime minister, Gordon Brown’s awkward YouTube appearances drew plenty of scorn, and of course we all know about Ed Balls Day. A struggle with modern media should not necessarily exclude someone from holding an important political role.
Trump’s problem, or perhaps his strength, is that his communication both on the internet and away from it is almost always polarising. To many people, he’s a very poor communicator. To others, meanwhile, he’s exactly what’s needed to “Make America Great Again”.
Let’s just hope he doesn’t forget how to spell ‘great’, or it may be time to buy shares in this company:
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