Like a paranoid version of Where’s Waldo, Donald Trump looked at the largely peaceful counter-protests in Boston today—where a 40,000-person avalanche came out to stand in contrast to a handful of snowflakes organizing a white nationalist “free speech” rally—and apparently spotted a bunch of so-called “anti-police agitators” lurking within. Taking to his beloved thumb-pulpit, Trump basically ignored the literally thousands of people marching in non-violent opposition to hate speech, instead praising the cops who had to put up with this murderous, unruly mob of savages.
As far as Donald Trump tweets go, this was a fairly successful one, in that it didn’t contain any obvious typos, and only a few blatant contradictions of factual reality. That’s more than can be said for a more vaguely conciliatory tweet he issued a few minutes later, in which the President Of The United States, in a formal communication, spelled the word “heal” wrong not just once, but two times in a row.
Let’s sidestep the fact that these tweets are yet another example of a dog-whistling technique that’s become a Donald Trump staple in recent weeks. (That is, vague statements of goodwill that carefully maneuver around language that would stop, say, white supremacists from viewing them as tacit messages of support.) There’s another issue at work here, and it’s this: Is the president’s auto-correct fucked up? How else would you spell it wrong twice, in exactly the same way?
As far as new worries to get obsessed over go, this one probably falls somewhere in the mid-range; it’s not quite as bad as outright praising the fine young Nazis of the world, but in a global scene where a single tweet can push nations into the next stage of nuclear posturing, it’s still kind of scary. What if it gets worse? We’re not huge advocates for our own species’ dignity these days, but it would still be nice if humanity’s tombstone didn’t read “Donald Trump tweeted ‘Nuke Korea’ when he meant ‘Nice convertible,’ and then we all just kind of died.”