President Donald Trump has been very active on Truth Social this morning, firing off posts about everything from last week’s terrible jobs report to India’s oil imports. But the president’s post about Sydney Sweeney and Taylor Swift had to be deleted and reposted several times to correct spelling errors on Monday. And it speaks to the chaos going on behind the scenes as the president posts to social media when he’s supposed to be running the country.
Sweeney is currently at the center of an online debate about an ad for clothing company American Eagle. The actress talks about genetics in an ad that ends with a homophone-based joke about jeans and genes. Some people see the ad as a dog whistle to racists (including many of the racists themselves), and Trump was first asked about it on Sunday, when he learned that Sweeney is a registered Republican.
The president seemed excited by the fact that a popular actress might be on his team politically and really leaned into it Monday morning with a whiny, error-riddled post that went in a few different directions on “wokeness.”
As you can see, Trump’s first stab at the post about Sweeney misspelled her name as “Sidney,” says “flying of the shelves” rather than off the shelves, and spells the beer as Bud Lite rather than Bud Light. Miller is the brand that uses “Lite” rather than Light.
Trump deleted and reposted the screed, fixing some of the errors and expanding the section about Taylor Swift, who he claimed was booed at the Super Bowl and “became NO LONGER HOT.” Swift was indeed booed by some people at the Super Bowl because she was there to support her boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce. Swift was reportedly booed by Philadelphia Eagles fans, not because the billionaire singer has become unpopular.
Trump also added a line, as you can see below, reading “Being WOKE is for losers, being Republican is what you want to be.” The president added another line to his second post that’s become extremely common in recent months: “Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
But the president deleted his post yet again, fixing his sentence about American Eagle jeans “flying of the shelves,” without fixing the part about Bud “Lite.”
One of the questions that people often have about Trump’s social media presence is how frequently he’s the person actually typing it out. Trump has famously never used a computer but has previously confirmed that he’s the one typing on his phone to send out many of his posts. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump said that he’s often dictating tweets during the day and it’s all his own typing at night after 7:00 p.m. But it’s unclear whether he’s stuck to that schedule.
The pro-Trump documentary series Art of the Surge showed what it was like tweeting with Trump during a speech from Kamala Harris in the 2024 campaign, and it really appeared to be a team process. Trump would dictate to the assistant sitting next to him, but plenty of other people in the room contributed ideas and suggested their own versions of talking points to people who ran other accounts associated with Trump’s campaign.
It wasn’t all celebrity nonsense on Monday morning. Trump also tried to address the fact that he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics last week after the agency reported weak job creation numbers and revised down previous months.
“Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged,” Trump wrote in a transparent lie. “That’s why, in both cases, there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!”
Trump fired Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from her nonpartisan role on Friday, and there’s absolutely no evidence she did anything wrong. In fact, more than 2,000 people work at the BLS, according to CNN, and it would have been impossible for McEntarfer to significantly alter the data without the coordination of dozens, if not hundreds, of accomplices. And, again, there’s no evidence she did that. Trump just shot the messenger and wants to install someone who will make it look like his economy is doing better than it is. The newly revised numbers showed the U.S. added 258,000 fewer jobs in May and June than first reported, a bad sign for the future of the economy.
Trump is an agent of chaos, firing off posts about anything and everything he sees on TV. But how do we know he’s mostly reacting to whatever pops up on television? Sometimes he just says as much, like when he recently said that he’s seen the starvation of children in Gaza on TV. This is a man with an entire intelligence community devoted to making sure he has the best and latest information from around the world. But he is fixated on whatever might be happening on the glowing boxes of mass media around him at all times.
Trump also seemed to be talking directly to the TV on Monday when he sent a few posts about Sen. Elizabeth Warren, writing, “Ask Pocahontas the real questions, CNBC!!!” Warren was on the financial news channel to discuss Trump’s firing of the BLS commissioner, pointing out that it’s extremely dangerous. Warren said Trump seemed poised to “put in some sycophant that makes the president happy,” which clearly set him off.
You’d think the job of the president would require a little more attention to world affairs and less to the criticism he’s hearing on TV. But obviously, this is a unique era in American history. And none of this dysfunction is going to get resolved anytime soon.
