The president has suffered withering defeats in his short tenure at the hands of Republican leadership, the U.S. courts, and in some—but not all—of his handshakes with foreign leaders. We can add to that list of foes who have matched wits with the president and found him wanting the category of “monosyllabic words,” in particular the word “heal,” which he has misspelled as “heel” at least three times in the past month. Earlier today, he fired off this missive, a call for unity, extremely presidential, etc.:
It was his second attempt at doing so. Behold, the pun-work of a nation:
And so on. The commander in chief previously shit the bed spelling this basic word after the terrorist attack by white supremacists in Charlottesville, when he had to take three cracks at this tweet in order to not spell “heal” as “heel”:
In both instances, he immediately deleted the offending tweet and then issued it again with the correct spelling, but, you know, sometimes you want to take a couple bites at the apple. It is easy to get pedantic with this sort of thing, chortling at his various punctuation errors and typos, a domain that often is, truly, the last refuge of the small-minded. It is also easy to wildly extrapolate from them, deeming it all irrefutable evidence of the president’s cognitive decline, when such things as “his behavior” and “the way he makes sentences” provide much sturdier proof. He might also just not be smart. Whatever the case, he is still the president, and he cannot spell the word “heal,” perhaps ultimately indicating that subconsciously he has no interest in doing it in the first place.