Twitter mocks Donald Trump for 'unpresidented' spelling mistake

Donald Trump made an 'unpresidented' typo.
 By 
Patrick Kulp
 on 
Original image replaced with Mashable logo
Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

In the heat of posting a provocative tweet early Saturday morning, Donald Trump's spell checker apparently failed him.

The president-elect called China's seizure of a U.S. Navy drone on Friday an "unpresidented [sic] act" before deleting the typo and replacing it with a correctly spelled statement.

Yet the intervening hour and a half in which the mistake sat unfixed gave the Twitter-sphere plenty of time to get in a few jokes at the expense of Trump's spelling skills.


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The hashtag "#unpresidented" quickly climbed to the top spot on the list of trending Twitter topics in the United States Saturday morning.

While the initial drafts of Trump's tweets are frequently rife with typos, most of which are corrected within minutes, Twitter users were especially drawn to this one for its unintended but deadly accurate double meaning."Unpresidented," of course, sounds like a pithy description of unprecedentedly un-presidential behavior.

Others were just blown away by how Trump could overlook such a glaring mistake for so long.

Even J.K. Rowling got in on the action.

Trump has said that he dictates the majority of his tweets to "one of the young ladies" in his office. But most of those posted after hours -- evenings, early mornings or on the weekend -- he writes and sends on his own.

As for the actual content of the tweet, Trump's statement follows criticism from the Chinese government of the U.S."hyping up" the incident. China has already agreed to return the watercraft.

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Patrick Kulp

Patrick Kulp is a Business Reporter at Mashable. Patrick covers digital advertising, online retail and the future of work. A graduate of UC Santa Barbara with a degree in political science and economics, he previously worked at the Pacific Coast Business Times.

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