He has the best words precisely because of his power to spread them far and wide. Trump may have been widely ridiculed for his poor grasp of the English language, but he may nonetheless be right about having the best words. For that glorious interlude between midnight and 5am, we were like passengers on the Titanic who decided to say “fuck it” and rock out to the band. The Twitterverse greeted “covfefe” with unfettered rapture. Climate of disbeliefĭuring the presidential election campaign, Donald Trump famously bragged: “ I have the best words”. Aside from the outstanding comedy potential, the obsession with #covfefe highlights how closely the world pays attention to everything that the US president says and does – and how desperate we are to make sense of it. By Thursday morning, the tweet was taken down and replaced by a coy challenge to Twitter: “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ? Enjoy!” In that sense, #covfefe offers us a more profound lesson about the relationship between power and language. It was symptomatic of a broader trend among the presidential staff to offer implausible explanations for the president’s actions and led to further jokes about his administration’s tenuous relationship with the truth.īut it may be Trump who had the last laugh. It fit into larger narratives of Trump’s impulsive and uncontrollable tweeting, his poorly conceived media strategy, his less-than-stellar intellect – and his small hands.Īn attempt by the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, to explain it away left correspondents baffled: “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Spicer replied to a question about Trump’s tweet. As the media scholar Jeffrey Jones has argued, satire opens up new forms of critique – allowing us to engage with political arguments that may be otherwise impossible to articulate. Residents of Covington, Kentucky, started a petition to change their town’s name to Covfefe, turning it “into the bigly-est and most beautiful must-see place from sea to shining sea.” True meaningĪnd so #covfefe became a meta-commentary which enabled audiences not just to laugh, but also to reflect on the larger controversies surrounding Trump’s presidency. Hillary Clinton, embroiled in a Twitter row with Trump after he again described her as “ Crooked Hillary” on Wednesday night, seized a golden opportunity when she wrote: “People in covfefe houses shouldn’t throw covfefe.”

Trump poster typo