Council. Councel. Counsel. One of these is the right spelling for "special counsel," but President Donald Trump doesn't know it.
Wednesday's Jimmy Kimmel Live honed in on Trump's poor spelling in his often rambling tweets. "I know a lot of people can't spell, but a lot of people aren't president," the ABC late-night host quipped.
On Wednesday, Trump went on another Twitter spree about the special counsel investigation into collusion between his campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election.
He tweeted:
“Special Council is told to find crimes, whether a crime exists or not. I was opposed to the selection of Mueller to be Special Council. I am still opposed to it. I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council appointed because.....
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018
But, as Kimmel pointed out, counsel is spelled wrong. Trump repeatedly spells it as "council."
"The president's nubby little fingers must have been going so fast, he made some mistakes," deduced Kimmel.
But it wasn't just counsel that was spelled incorrectly. An earlier version of the tweet spelled "whether" as "wether." Trump deleted and reposted the tweet with the correct spelling—though counsel remained misspelled. "They still haven't corrected the spelling of 'counsel.' I guess he wants to show his base he won't be swayed by a bunch of left-wing, liberal dictionaries," Kimmel joked.
"If you're wondering whether our president is crazy or just dumb—people have been saying, 'I don't know if he's crazy or dumb'—dumb just won another round," said Kimmel.
Kimmel and his team combed through the archives and found that Trump has "had a lot of trouble in the past with that word."
On May 8 last year, Trump spelled counsel "council," but later corrected the tweet. 10 days later, May 18, he spelled it "councel," and again later deleted and corrected his message. Trump misspelled it again on July 22, but didn't correct himself:
So many people are asking why isn't the A.G. or Special Council looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes. 33,000 e-mails deleted?
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017
"A leader who cannot spell is potentially dangerous," Kimmel told his audience. "What if he gets hungry and he thinks he's sending a text and instead he tweets, 'Preparing to order LAUNCH. Maybe we'll get some Chinese!' We could wind up at war with China. If only there was a program on our phones that told us when we misspelled something."
Earlier in March, Trump misspelled Alec Baldin as "Alex Baldwin" and dying as "dieing" in a tweet that went viral.
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