One man’s covfefe is another man’s joke

Pretend just for a minute that Barack Obama, while he was President of the United States, had accidentally tweeted, “Michelle and I are taking the kids and going covfefe…”

Everybody would have laughed. The media would have laughed. Facebook would have laughed. Twitter would have erupted with jokes... just like it did when Donald J. Trump accidentally tweeted that mysterious word the other night.

Covfefe.

If Obama had done it, Liberals would have laughed along with him and made convivial comments, like “Get a couple of fefes for me while you’re there” or “Be careful, an adult covfefe can be dangerous when disturbed,” while Republicans would have posted snarky comments suggesting in dog-whistle language that Obama, being black, was too stupid to operate a Twitter account and should be impeached (or hanged).

Sean Hannity would have conjured up a conspiracy theory that “covfefe” was somehow tied to Radical Islamic Terrorism and that the Muslim traitor Obama was sending a coded message telling ISIS where and when to strike America.

Obama, for his part, would have probably smiled and played along with the joke. He would have tweeted something the next day like “Had a great time at covfefe” or “After a hard day of being president, sometimes my fingers go off walking on their own.”  He would never have sent his White House press spokesman out to say that “the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.”

Seriously, Sean Spicer? That’s the best you can do?

It was the perfect opportunity to show that Trump is at least partly human. Spicer could have made a joke. He could have said, for example, that “the media is always kidding the president about having small hands, so sometimes they just type covfefe.” He could have said it was something Trump learned on his foreign trip, like maybe when he put his hands on the Saudis' mysterious orb. He could have said almost anything except what he actually said.

In two weeks, it will have been two years since Trump and his wife descended the escalator in Trump Tower to announce that he was running for the Republican nomination for president. He has been on television every single day since, and not once in two years has he ever said he was wrong about anything, was sorry about anything, made a mistake about anything or is anything less than the planet's only perfect man.

In those two years he's proven himself to be good at making up lies but completely incapable of telling the truth or even making a simple joke, and I’m sick of it. I’m just so sick of it.

Today, we think he’s going to pull the United States out of an historic climate change agreement that involves nearly 200 nations around the world [UPDATE: He did.] so that his wealthy backers in the fossil fuel business can continue polluting the air and stuffing their pockets with cash. He’ll put us into a new Basket of Deplorables with only two other countries: Syria, one of the most deplorable places on earth; and Nicaragua, the second poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere.

I don’t know about you, but that’s not where I want America to be. Trump should be ashamed to even say those words out loud, let alone in an orchestrated Rose Garden ceremony on national TV, but he won’t be ashamed, and that’s the real shame of it all.

I keep writing that the things Trump says and does would be funny if they weren’t so sad, but Trump doesn’t do jokes, so there is no funny in Trump. The only exception, I thought, was when he rode the golden staircase to tell us he was running for President of the United States, but it turned out that joke was on us... and that was the saddest joke of all.