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Donald Trump
Photo by Ian Maule/Getty Images

Great, Donald Trump can’t even spell the country he’s determined to start a trade war with

The White House spell checker must have been on lunch.

In the least surprising news of the week, Donald Trump still boasts the reading level of a teething toddler, which recently led to an embarrassing blunder of presidential proportions.

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It’s mortifying enough to be a citizen in President Trump’s America, but it becomes much more humiliating when the man proves, through official actions, just how dim-witted he really is. This is a total hypothetical, I promise, but can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to realize that Trump can’t even spell the country he’s been threatening for going on a week now? That would be utterly shameful all on its own, but let’s take it one step further: What if he then blasted that ignorance for the world to see? Perhaps by including his misunderstanding of how letters string together on an official White House announcement?

Yeeeep, that’s the unfortunate reality for Americans this week, as we grapple with the reality that the rotten orange at the head of our government has exactly as much grey matter in between his ears as he has light behind his eyes. In a word: Zero. Because there’s no arguing for the intelligence of a man who can’t even spell Colombia, even as he hurls threats the country’s way.

Trump proved as much in an official White House update over the weekend, in which he referred to the country as Columbia — as in the clothing line or entertainment company. The official letter, which was scheduled for “IMMEDIATE” release on Jan. 26, promised “President Donald J. Trump’s TRUTH on Columbia Sanctions.”

People who passed sixth grade spelling quickly caught onto the mistake, prompting them to remind the Trump White House that spell checkers exist. The flub was even corrected a single sentence into the letter, showcasing that someone on the Trump team has neurons firing, but they apparently weren’t tapped to spell-check the headline.

Trump’s latest flub isn’t prompting the same level of reactionary comedy many of his mistakes inspire, but there are still plenty of humorous — and harrowing — takeaways, as people face the reality that we’re only one week into this hell scape. Only 207 left to go.

Accurately noting that “loyalty does not equal education,” commenters joked that the White House “must have had Lauren Boebert proofreading” Trump’s letters. Hilariously, some Trump voters even stepped in to defend their president’s error, but they employed fittingly brainless explanations to excuse away 47’s intellectually-devoid error.

According to this award-winning argument, posed by X user @youwishmusic, the country is in fact spelled Colombia “in Spanish and by most Spanish speaking countries,” but they were quick to note that “other countries and languages have a different spelling.” This Olympic-level reach then cites French, Polish, Romanian, and Turkish spellings of the word, which include France’s “Colombie” and, most notably, Romania’s alleged “Columbia.”

Ah yes, silly me! I foolishly forgot that Trump was just practicing his Romanian — not misspelling a country! The man who couldn’t learn Czech for his first wife, Slovenian for his third, or even rudimentary Spanish for his innumerable Spanish-speaking countrymen is suddenly expanding his linguistic base, and he’s starting with Romanian. Checks out.

In reality, this was just another embarrassing Trump mistake. It’s not overly consequential at the end of the day — the threatened trade war is far more pressing — but it is a nice reminder that Trump is nothing without the people pulling the strings. A popular and polarizing puppet he may be, but on his own Trump can’t tell the difference between a country and the brand behind his secretary’s winter coat.


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Author
Image of Nahila Bonfiglio
Nahila Bonfiglio
Nahila carefully obsesses over all things geekdom and gaming, bringing her embarrassingly expansive expertise to the team at We Got This Covered. She is a Staff Writer and occasional Editor with a focus on comics, video games, and most importantly 'Lord of the Rings,' putting her Bachelors from the University of Texas at Austin to good use. Her work has been featured alongside the greats at NPR, the Daily Dot, and Nautilus Magazine.