An easy way to save time & words
Oh, Donnie, so touchy (and yet so quick with the insults), and so helpless to respond cogently.
At a recent round table meeting of business executives, & long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words. The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2019
No, you didn’t. Come on now. You, save time and words? You love nothing better than talking on and on and on and on with no one getting a word in. That explosion in a word salad factory at CPAC the other week? You went on for more than two hours. You’re a world-class blabbermouth, you’re the bore in the adjacent airplane seat or barstool or chair at the corporation dinner, you’re the guy people run from because they don’t want to get stuck listening to you.
Also “of Apple” doesn’t take all that long to say, and you didn’t actually want to say it anyway, because you sort of get that the adults in the room already know who is from where. It would be weird for you to address everyone as Name Name of Corporation every time you said his (it’s pretty much always his) name. In short, that’s not a thing, and you know it.
You looked dumb, and the news media reported it. This tweet doesn’t make you look clever.
Be fair. He is very keen to save time and words spent on other people. That leaves more time and words to spend on Trump.
Coulda been worse. Coulda called him Tim Windows.
Ba-dump tsssh!
To be fair, this is the sort of mistake anyone could make. To be also fair, Trump is in the habit of saying so many stupid things that when he says that, it’s hard to take it as just a stupid mistake.
If Obama…or Clinton…or Nixon…or Reagan…had said that, they would have owned up to making a silly mistake, laughed at it for a minute, and the moment would have passed. Because Trump can’t let it go, the mistake will continue to live as just another example of ignorance and hubris on the part of Trump.
The best past of this tweet is what it reveals: that he was angry and embarrassed at his fuckup.
And that he has assistants to come up with words like “disparaging” and spell them akkuritly.
iknklast, to me, that’s just it — a normal, psychologically healthy person would just laugh it off, and aside from a few ideologically-motivated critics, everyone would move on quickly. When Obama made an erroneous reference to having visited “all 57 states,” a few Obama supporters tried to rationalize it by counting all the non-states that held primary contests (DC, Puerto Rico, etc.), but Obama himself just sort of brushed it off as a dumb slip of the tongue and moved on. And, aside from a few right-wing whackos who decided to jump on this as PROOF that Obama is really stupid and therefore didn’t earn his way into Columbia and Harvard and his book must have been ghostwritten by Bill Ayers and and and…. even most conservatives let it go with just a grumble about how mean the media was about George W Bush’s blunders.
But Trump is such a narcissist that he’s incapable of admitting that he made a perfectly understandable slip. No doubt some people will portray this as some brilliant piece of populist manipulation, but I think it’s just the opposite. Trump has his choice of a dozen things a day he can declare war on the media for, he doesn’t need to grasp for a topic on which even many of his own supporters would go “hmmm, not so sure about this one.” And it’s good for a leader, especially a populist one, to show a little humility now and then. Hell, Trump could have had his cake and eaten it, too: admit the mistake and then attack the media for having (supposedly) made such a big deal about it. Have Sarah Sanders issue a statement saying “yes, it’s true, the President is human and misspoke someone’s name during one of his many meetings. Meanwhile, the same media that wants to make a big deal about this little slip of the tongue has gotten major important stories wrong, like…[list of actual admitted reporting errors.]” Blah blah blah media hates Trump so much they lie to the people blah blah blah.
In general, I think Trump has really blown his chances to be much more popular than he is. Remember all those times in the early days of his presidency when the media was so eager to declare “today is the day that Donald Trump REALLY became president” that they would do it every time he managed to read three sentences from a teleprompter and not saying something overtly racist? The media was dying to have a honeymoon with Trump, and he repeatedly blew it.
iknklast: I remember a news bit when Bush Sr. was giving a speech to either a veteran’s group or on a military base on December 7th and started orating about “December 7th, a day that will live in infamy…” and was corrected by a few shouts from the audience. Pretty big gaffe from a WW2 vet who served in the Pacific! After an abashed chuckle he made a self-deprecating joke and continued.
Screechy, Bruce, yes, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about! I do it in my classes sometimes – oops, working along, say something stupid, back up and apologize, blame it on Monday (even if it isn’t Monday because always good for a laugh), and move on.
Bush Jr., though, wasn’t very good about that, either. I remember when he was asked what mistakes he’d made, and he couldn’t think of anything. He viewed himself as infallible (though I think he’s gotten better as an ex-President). Reagan would have come up with something, probably minor, laughed, made some joke about Nancy telling him he shouldn’t do that, and move on. All the others would have, as well. But we went from Dubya unable to think of any mistakes he made to a more extreme version in Trump who does seem to see himself as infallible. I think with Dubya, it was just lack of knowledge of his screw ups. With Trump, I think it’s plain old narcissism and inability to acknowledge his screw ups, as well as lack of knowledge of his screw ups.
Doctor’s report or no, I’ll like him a whole lot more once he’s up on he his gold plated catafalque.
Bruce Coppola,
I was a bit confused by your comment as December 7 is the day Pearl Harbor was attacked. A bit of googling turned up this. Turns out he was speaking on September 7.