Donald Trump's Misspellings

As the  Twitter frenzy in August over Donald Trump's confusing "heel" with "heal" shows, the current president is prone to misspellings that seem to be the result of frantic and careless tweeting.  Anybody can make an occasional typo or misspell a word, and as the book by Marilyn Vos Savant and others have argued, bad spelling says little about a person's intelligence. Maybe he has a "disorganized" and distracted or scattered mind, but that is not the same as being unintelligent.

For Trump, as some gleefully pointed out in this particular case, the misspelling may be a kind of Freudian slip. Because the mistakes are made repeatedly, it seems unlikely to just be a result of being rushed, although rushing with public statements made via such a public form as Twitter is never a good idea.

His dismissal of the importance of regular spelling mistakes reveals that he doesn't quite understand or care how such mistakes might hurt his credibility with a broader audience. More likely, and more importantly, the continued typos this far into his presidency reveal a kind of isolation and lack of process. As stated, bad spelling is not in and of itself an indication of lack of smarts, but an educated writer at least learns to know when he might need to take additional time, or get help with proofreading. You should learn what kinds of errors you are prone to make and work to avoid making them in print.

As Internet commenters have noted, this may in fact be a rather trivial matter to focus on, but it is not the spelling that matters as much as how these kind of repeated errors indicate some larger issues at work.

Of course, other authors have been more meticulously cataloging the president's errors, some as a springboard for discussing language issues. (His aggressive use of quotation marks is particularly amusing.) On a darker note, some columnists have presented arguments for Trump's cognitive decline based on his struggles with language; Charles Pierce's piece makes a particularly compelling case that squares with my own experiences. 

Either way, if the president continues to be convincing to a certain percentage of people in spite of these errors, it reinforces the idea that we live in an increasingly post-literate society that places undue value on emotional rhetoric and even distrusts overly polished prose. This is not a new development in rough-and-ready America, which has always had a strong anti-intellectual vibe, but it is disturbing to see it codified via social media and the Internet through such official and powerful channels.