Having never been a president of the United States, but a pretty darned good proofreader, I’m appalled and disappointed to hear about a former U.S president’s typos.
A former president who’s planning to run again in the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign… if he isn’t serving time for some things he’s been charged with allegedly doing… but that’s another story.
Presidents are expected to be spot-on accurate, whether we’re talking about presidents of giant business firms, or presidents of entire nations.
What’s that about the buck stopping at top folks’ desks?
And what if the bucks we’re talking about are big bucks, like big numbers in a company’s annual report? And what if the commas in the long string of numbers after the dollar sign are screwed up, so a firm’s quarterly earnings of $1,000,000,000 are incorrectly printed out in the annual report as $1,000,000? That’s a problem! Ultimately, you’d think people at pinnacles of huge companies and huge governments would bear some, if not all, responsibility for ensuring things are in order.
Which brings us to former President Trump, who very recently, on his Truth Social site, noted:
“I am reading reports that failed former Lt. Governor of Georgia, Jeff Duncan, will be testifying before the Fulton County Grand Jury. He shouldn’t. I barely know him but he was, right from the beginning of this Witch Hunt, a nasty disaster.”
As a matter of fact, as I’m about to wind up writing this column, and I’m about to send it to the Daily Post, on TV, there’s breaking news about Mr. Trump, and I think, it’s 18 others, being indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in an election interference probe, according to ABC News and other news media. I’m typing this breaking news quickly, and hoping I won’t have any typos in this article.
But, back, for a moment, to Mr. Trump’s social media post about Mr. Duncan. According to an article in the news website, Common Dreams, Mr. Duncan, whom Mr. Trump describes as “that failed former Lt. Governor Jeff Duncan… actually, his name isn’t spelled Jeff. ‘Geoff’ is the correct spelling of his name.
So there’s an error, right there, in the former president’s post.
There are, at times, grammatical errors, not only in Mr. Trump’s social media posts, but sometimes in his remarks at campaign rallies. He tends to drop words from sentences, in his political rhetoric, leaving folks to wonder what he’s talking about. That’s concerning, if people at the top leave out some key directive… like, for instance … “Did I tell anyone to launch the missiles? Whatever they might have thought I said, I didn’t say. It wasn’t my fault!”
Everyone makes mistakes, every once in a while, but the former president seems to compound mistakes.
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.