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 ...
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