COVFEFE… How Much Do We Know?

Remember this?

How many of you knew this (either then or now)?

Via Wikipedia

“Covfefe”[edit]

The COVFEFE Act

On May 31, 2017, Trump sent out a tweet that read, in its entirety, “Despite the constant negative press covfefe”. It immediately went viral, becoming an Internet meme and a source of widespread jokes.^[94][95] The tweet was liked and retweeted over a hundred thousand times, making it one of the most popular tweets of 2017 to that date, as people speculated on the meaning of “covfefe”.^[96] About five hours later, Trump deleted the tweet and sent out an alternative one, asking people what they thought “covfefe” could mean.^[96]The Independent later noted that “covfefe” most likely meant “coverage”.^[97]

Off camera, at a press briefing later the same day, Sean Spicer responded to questions about the tweet with the statement “the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant”. No further explanation was given during the briefing.^[98] Some reporters, observing that Spicer did not appear to be joking, were concerned by the implications. Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, writing for the National Review, considered it unlikely that “covfefe” is “some esoteric code word”, suggesting instead, “Spicer feels compelled to protect the myth of Trumpian infallibility at all costs”.^[99]The Atlantic‘s Megan Garber felt that Spicer’s response further divided the White House from the public by giving a likely typo “the whiff of conspiracy”.^[100] At The Washington Post, Callum Borchers instead argued that the deliberately obscure response was an intentional tactic to distract the media and public from the administration’s other controversies.^[101]

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Leonid Bershidsky writing for Bloomberg View compared the phenomenon to Ronald Reagan when the president made a gaffe joking on a live microphone, “We begin bombing in five minutes“.^[102] Bershidsky compared Reagan’s comment to Trump’s: “Reagan’s infamous ‘nuclear joke,’ which rocked world leaders, was 136 characters long, just right for a tweet.”^[102]Compliance Week noted: “In Reagan’s case, he immediately admitted the error and squashed it. In Trump’s case, he sent a wrong message and then allowed it to sit for hours untended.”^[103]

Two weeks later, Democratic representative Mike Quigley filed legislation titled the Communications Over Various Feeds Electronically for Engagement (COVFEFE) Act, using the term made famous in Trump’s tweet. The bill would amend the Presidential Records Act to cover social media, thus requiring tweets and other social media posts by the U.S. President to be preserved under law.^[104]

The state of Georgia prohibited the use of the word “covfefe” on vanity license plates.^[105]

Trump continues to baffle us with what seems like bullshit on a regular basis. Sometimes he pulls the wool over our eyes and at other times he gives us a preview of what is to come.

If you think you KNOW what everything he is doing, tweeting or talking about means at any given moment you probably don’t.

The only way to TRY and understand what this administration is doing is to step back outside of your box and look down on it from about ten thousand feet. From there you have to try and put the pieces together from as many different sources as possible.

And even then – good luck. At this stage everything is speculation.