When the smallest error is too big to admit
Trump’s ‘Tim Apple’ slip shows his dedication to never conceding a mistake
WASHINGTON— U.S. President Donald Trump called Apple chief executive Tim Cook “Tim Apple” at a White House event last Wednesday. There was some brief internet chuckling. The world moved on.
Trump did not move on. In a tweet on Monday, five days later, Trump claimed he had not made a mistake at all. Rather, he dubiously declared, “I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/ Apple as an easy way to save time & words. The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!”
This was in keeping with Trump’s long-standing approach to minor verbal missteps. At least 20 times in office, the president has responded to a trivial error by amending the erroneous word in a way that does not acknowledge any error at all.
The prepared text of his State of the Union address in 2018, emailed to reporters by the White House in advance, had Trump lauding a Homeland Security agent named Celestino Martinez, who “goes by C.J.” Instead, Trump said, “He goes by D.J.” Then he added: “And C.J. He said, ‘Call me either one.’ So we’ll call you C.J.”
Trump has repeatedly used “and” in this way — to suggest his erroneous initial word was just as valid as the correct word he has added afterward. He has spoken of a Border Patrol agent “on the Clintons’, and Chiltons’, ranch,” mocked a country that opposed the presence of U.S. “mishes, and missiles,” urged skeptics of his Israel policy to “open our hearts and minds to possible, and possibilities,” and boasted of beating election expectations “for the midtown, and midturn, year,” not quite getting to “midterm” on the second try.
He pulled the “and” trick three separate times in his September speech to the United Nations, as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes noted. In one of them, he said that “tolerance for human struggling, and human smuggling, and trafficking, is not humane.”
Gwenda Blair, author of a biography on Trump, said the president is a disciple of the “school of Roy.” One of Trump’s key mentors, the late ethicschallenged lawyer Roy Cohn, advocated endless brawling over any admission of fault.
“Never back down, never say you’re sorry, never acknowledge any mistakes, if something goes wrong it’s somebody else’s fault, double down, triple down, throw anything back in the opposition’s face,” Blair said. “It’s worked pretty well with a certain constituency.”
There might also be a famously large ego involved — and Trump’s oft-expressed worry about being laughed at. For Trump, Blair said, “saying you’re wrong for something small is as bad saying you’re wrong for something large. It’s admitting some kind of fallibility.”
At an Illinois rally in October, Trump said a large percentage of American steel jobs were “vanquished” before he took office, an inadvertent departure from his usual line about how they had “vanished.”
“You could say ‘vanquished’ and ‘vanished.’ It’s a combination of both,” he said.
Trump received furious criticism in July for saying, while appearing beside Russian President Vladimir Putin, that “I don’t see any reason why it would be” Russia that interfered in the 2016 election.
His implausible explanation more than 24 hours later: “I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t.’ The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t — or why it wouldn’t — be Russia.’”
Press secretary Sarah Sanders said the next day that Trump’s willingness to admit such errors demonstrates his “credibility.”
“When he sees that he has misspoken,” she said, “he comes out and he says that.”