Covfefe: President Trump’s late-night Twitter typo goes viral

On Tuesday night, President Donald Trump got out his cell phone and started to complain about the media. It’s not an unusual thing for the president to do.

Instead of typing “constant negative press coverage,” he ended up complaining about “constant negative press covfefe” — and then hit “tweet” before completing his thought.

This is not an unusual thing to happen on the internet.

But because this is the president of the United States — and because the fact that the president of the United States makes a habit of getting out his phone and whining that the media is treating him unfairly, on Twitter, long after many Americans have gone to bed — it made a big splash.

Screenshot via Chris Geidner of BuzzFeed

It seems obvious enough that the president meant to complain about press coverage rather than press covfefe. The letters f and e are right next to the letters r and g on a QWERTY keyboard. And it’s a pretty good bet to assume that any given tweet from the president of the United States is a complaint about the media, these days.

There were dumb jokes. There were memes. Two characters, both claiming to be named Covfefe, argued in the president’s @-replies about which of them was the true inheritor of the title (and which deserved to seek the orb).

It’s late-night Twitter, after a month of scoops and scandals that has left the political world exhausted.

It would have been totally respectable for President Trump to admit the error and take the L. Let he who has never accidentally hit enter in the middle of a message, or tweeted a typo, cast the first stone.

But instead, the president and his allies tried to turn covfefe into some sort of symbol of his magnetic charisma — something that puzzled the fake-news elites and thrilled his fans.

When he finally deleted the original covfefe tweet on Wednesday morning, President Trump tweeted this instead:

Trump campaign surrogate Kayleigh McEnany went further, portraying covfefe as an “intentional” sign that the president is “just like us”:

And asked about it at a press briefing Wednesday, press secretary Sean Spicer implied it was some sort of inside joke that only the president and his closest friends understood:

This is absurd. It’s a sustained performance of bullshit. It’s exactly what we’ve come to expect from this administration.

It wasn’t inherently undignified for the president to tweet about “constantly negative press covfefe,” any more than it would have been to tweet about “constantly negative press coverage” to begin with.

But President Trump is simply unable to admit error, ever. He and his defenders appear to have a compulsive need to turn every impulsive action the president takes into some well-considered step toward a master plan. And that, more than the errors themselves, is what makes it hard to take anything this White House says seriously.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

Most news outlets make their money through advertising or subscriptions. But when it comes to what we’re trying to do at Vox, there are a couple reasons that we can't rely only on ads and subscriptions to keep the lights on.

First, advertising dollars go up and down with the economy. We often only know a few months out what our advertising revenue will be, which makes it hard to plan ahead.

Second, we’re not in the subscriptions business. Vox is here to help everyone understand the complex issues shaping the world — not just the people who can afford to pay for a subscription. We believe that’s an important part of building a more equal society. We can’t do that if we have a paywall.

That’s why we also turn to you, our readers, to help us keep Vox free. If you also believe that everyone deserves access to trusted high-quality information, will you make a gift to Vox today?

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via