‘Covfefe’ and a secret meeting

In the third instalment of our series recapping an unprecedented presidency, Joe Sommerlad looks at a baffling tweet and a clandestine gathering at Trump Tower brought to light

‘Despite the constant negative press covfefe,’ Trump’s tweet read, before trailing off (AFP via Getty)

Before Donald Trump won the presidency and began using his Twitter account to “terminate” cabinet members, whine about the “LameStream Media” denying him adulation and promote favourable coverage from Fox News, his social media output was rather different.

“Robert I’m getting a lot of heat for saying you should dump Kristen – but I’m right. If you saw the Miss Universe girls you would reconsider,” he told the actor Robert Pattinson over his on-off relationship with Twilight franchise co-star Kristen Stewart on 18 October 2012.

“Cher – I don’t wear a ‘rug’ – it’s mine. And I promise not to talk about your massive plastic surgeries that didn’t work,” he sneered at the pop diva on 13 November 2012.

“I have never seen a thin person drinking Diet Coke,” he noted on 14 October 2014.

But once in the Oval Office, Trump’s account – today boasting some 89m followers – became a weapon of mass distraction, the president using it to reset the day’s media narrative on a whim or to bypass a Fourth Estate he considered hopelessly antagonistic and biased in order to disseminate propaganda unmediated.

His haranguing house style was nothing if not consistent but, at 11.06pm on the night of 30 May 2017, he issued a tweet so weird it flummoxed the world.

Things had started to improve for the president until that moment.

He had weathered the anger over his travel ban and the firing of James Comey, looked decisive by ordering a sudden missile strike on Syria on 6 April in response to Bashar al-Assad carrying out a chemical weapons attack against its own people and stubbornly held onto his “under audit” tax returns (released willingly by every sitting president since Richard Nixon, barring Gerald Ford).

He had endeared himself to establishment Republicans by installing conservative judge Neil Gorsuch in the US Supreme Court (and, indeed, by proposing the abolition of estate tax to benefit the wealthy, courting the same demographic he had accused of profiteering while others struggled during his inauguration address).

He had also just returned from his maiden voyage overseas, posing with King Salman, the Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and a mysterious glowing orb in Saudi Arabia, visiting the Western Wall and telling Israel his son-in-law Jared Kushner would secure the “ultimate deal” by masterminding peace in the Middle East, met Pope Francis and rebuked Nato leaders in Brussels for not paying their defence dues.

But he undermined it all with one six-word, minimalist masterpiece, starting a post then apparently drifting off to sleep without realising he’d sent it.

“Despite the constant negative press covfefe”, the tweet read, trailing off.

The world’s media went wild attempting to decipher the proclamation, with some suggesting that, instead of merely misspelling “coverage”, he had accidentally invented the ideal noun, worthy of Lewis Carroll, to express the upturned logic of his administration, proving once and for all that he had been right to claim on the campaign trail in 2015: “I know words, I have the best words.”

Asked for an explanation by the press corps, a humourless Sean Spicer refused to share in their perplexity and insisted: “I think the president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.”

Trump retrospectively attempted to argue his post “may be something with deep meaning!” but the ludicrousness of this particular cultural moment was now beyond doubt.

The rest of the president’s first June and July in the White House was equally loaded with incident, beginning with his provocative announcement that he planned to withdraw from the 2015 Paris climate accord on 1 June.

With North Korea continuing to defy international sanctions by testing intercontinental ballistic missiles in support of Kim Jong-un’s nuclear ambitions, the Russia investigation continued apace with Comey and Jeff Sessions lightly grilled by the Senate Intelligence Committee on 7 and 12 June.

The president himself finally met Vladimir Putin in person at the G20 summit in Germany, nominated Christopher Wray as Comey’s replacement and banned transgender citizens from serving in the military, sparking fresh protests from LGBT+ activists.

But it was his son, Donald Trump Jr, who found himself in the soup when he was forced to hand over emails to federal investigators after The New York Times revealed he had arranged a highly suspicious meeting at Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, apparently to discuss “dirt” she may or may not have been privy to regarding Hillary Clinton.

The eventual hush-hush gathering attended by the organiser, Veselnitskaya, Kushner and Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, amongst others, had ultimately come to nothing but the embarrassing eagerness with which the Republican nominee’s team had leapt at the offer of foreign intelligence on a domestic election rival looked distinctly unseemly, to put it mildly.

Read the full The Trump Review series here