Typos Reveal Lack of Fitness for Presidency

John McWhorter
Contributing editor at The Atlantic and professor at Columbia University

... Trump’s writing suggests not just inadequate manners or polish—not all of us need be dainty—but inadequate thought. Nearly every time he puts thumb to keypad, he exposes that he has never progressed beyond the mentality of the precollegiate, trash-talking teen ...

... Trump, writing to the entire nation, is happy with a half-dozen flubs in one terse tweet. The sheer lack of focus on Trump’s part, and by extension, the staff who should be vetting messages like this, is stunning ...

Trump is given to talking about “doing” things when most would choose a more specific verb. Last summer, Trump bragged of having told Britain’s Prime Minister Theresa May “how to do Brexit.” “Do” it? Like “doing” Cats, or shots? Mere do does rather gracelessly drag the statement down to the cold, hard pavement. Trump also hopes he can “do” a wall in Mexico: “That’s 13,000 miles,” he said. “Here, we actually need 1,000 because we have natural barriers. So we need 1,000. We can do a wall. We’re going to have a big, fat, beautiful door right in the middle of the wall” ...

Trump’s admirers might see him as a straight shooter, focused on telling us what’s on his mind, too busy doing the right things to bother with niceties. The tragedy is that in his hurried, lexically impoverished blurts, Trump almost daily shows us that what’s on his mind is very little.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/what-trumps-typos-reveal/579919/