President Donald Trump wanted to put out a message of strong condemnation on Monday morning against Democrats who opposed his proposed wall on the southern border. Unfortunately, while doing so he made a spelling error, one that resulted in him later deleting and re-issuing the tweet with the correct version of the word he intended to use.
“Anytime you hear a Democrat saying that you can have good Boarder Security without a Wall, write them off as just another politician following the party line,” Trump initially wrote on Monday, according to reporting from USA Today . Trump, in writing the word “boarder,” used a homonym of the word “border.”
The two words have very distinct differences. A “boarder” is someone who boards (e.g. a person who boards a ship). A “border” is an imaginary geographic line that divides two separate areas.
Perhaps because of embarrassment or perhaps just to correct the mistake that detracted from his original intended message, Trump deleted the errant post and issued another tweet later in the morning — this time with the proper “border” in place of the word “boarder.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has misspelled words in his tweets only to later delete them and re-issue them with the corrected spelling, according to reporting from the Daily Mail . On the very first day of his presidency, for instance, he stated he was “honered” to serve as president — a misspelling of the word “honored.”
Trump calls for ‘boarder security’ instead of ‘border security’: https://t.co/ZGANl2jVRG pic.twitter.com/88Hv8pykPI
— The Daily Dot (@dailydot) December 17, 2018
Deleting tweets brings with it controversy in and of itself. There are some who are concerned over whether Trump doing so violates the Presidential Records Act, which requires all communications, mass and internal, to be preserved for historical record.
Trump’s predecessor, former President Barack Obama, also made mistakes and corrected them on his @POTUS Twitter account. Officials for the former president said they archived his deleted tweets off of the social media site in compliance of the Presidential Records Act. It’s not clear whether the Trump administration is doing anything similar for deleted tweets by the current commander in chief, according to reporting from PRI .
As for the content of Trump’s original and revised tweet, a border wall may not be the best option for keeping undocumented immigrants from entering the country illegally. In fact, according to reporting from the New York Times , a survey conducted in 2017 of Customs and Border Protection agents found that less than one half of 1 percent even mentioned a wall as a needed option when it came to securing the border.
