Why Trump's 'covfefe' tweet caused a social media meltdown

The non-sequitur was shared at around 4am GMT

Inadvertently, Donald Trump is one of the great wits of our age. Accidentally, he is a comic of viral proportions, a quippy commentator of global esteem. His USP? An unmastery of his modern medium, Twitter, where he serves topical aphorisms in the manner of a modern, illiterate Oscar Wilde. And this morning, the world delighted in his latest — a non sequitur shared at around 4am GMT. “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”, the leader tweeted. The editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary responded: “Wakes up. Checks Twitter. Lookups fo... Regrets checking Twitter. Goes back to bed.” Meanwhile, Urban Dictionary defined the word as “When you want to say ‘coverage’ but your hands are too small to hit all the letters on the keyboard.”

It is a characteristic gaffe, though at this stage it is debatable whether or not something that happens so regularly can still be termed a gaffe.

Trump has not yet followed up, though he might have to, for thanks to the velocity of virality, an online misstep paces across the world in seconds, and thousands of amateur commentators have gleefully stepped up to fill the President’s resounding silence. One riffed on the brainwashed press secretary Sean’s Spicer’s likely reaction (“Tomorrow Sean Spicer: ‘Good morning. Covfefe for being here today’”), another shared a picture of her dad, who overnight bought the number plate “COVFEFE”. At this rate, “covfefe” almost certainly has a shot at the OED’s word of the year. Most suspect that he was indeed trying to write the word “coverage”, but that spell-check — or his small, adipose hands — mangled it.

Covfefe enters into a grand tradition of similar online misspeaks. Trump is a serial offender — commentators point to the time he misspelled “unprecedented” when criticising China (“China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unpresidented act”) and inadvertently invoked his own chief deficiency (Trump is nothing if not unpresidential), or the time he tried to tweet his daughter Ivanka, but instead bleated at some poor woman in Brighton with the same first name. He called @Ivanka “great, a woman with real character and class”.

But Twitter is undeniably a perilous medium for the hot-headed, clumsy or inept. Take newly anointed national treasure, Ed Balls, who is an example of the latter: Balls accidentally created Ed Balls Day (April 28), after tweeting his own name in 2011. To his credit, Balls now owns his day — retweeting the original tweet and crowing along with the rest of us. Less successfully, Spicer is also of the latter school —in January, the calamitous Hermes of Trump’s regime tweeted out a string of numbers and letters, swiftly deleted, that some theorised could be a nuclear code. It transpires it was likely a Bitcoin string (no, us neither). Spicer has also accidentally publicly shared replies to private direct messages.

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Then there are the hashtags that rival “covfefe” for viral appeal: earlier this year, scurrilous Twitter users were thrilled to see the hashtag celebrating Ed Sheeran’s album party, “#edsheeranalbumparty”, gallop around the net (read it again). Scottish singer Susan Boyle’s PR team issued its own “#susanalbumparty” in 2012, and scandalised her mild-mannered fans (you must have got it by now).

Some users protest hacks to write over potential gaffes. Last year, Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn distanced himself from a series of tweets that duly went viral, claiming malign intervention. “Here we... here we... here we f*cking go!!!” was innocent enough, if redolent of a day down the Emirates, though, “Davey Cameron is a pie” was a bit more incendiary, and “f*ck trident” was probably a rather too informal manner in which to announce policy.

Tweeters, get the message: engage brain, re-read twice before you send — and change your password regularly.

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