Once when I was serving in the federal government, in the early 2000s, the Treasury Department was ready to issue an obscure communique. Just before it was set to be released, someone noticed a stray punctuation mark. The picayune typo could have led some to interpret the communique as a U.S. policy reversal on some territory where sovereignty was disputed. This mattered: Historically, foreign officials and the press parse every word that presidents and policy principals say to decipher any changes in policy. Even minute shifts in language can send important signals to the world.
In this case, the moment the typo was detected, we fixed the problem before it went public. A minor kerfuffle was averted.
Now imagine trying to clean up President-elect Donald Trump’s statements.
From both the campaign and the first few weeks of the transition, we know that Trump will pop off at anyone he perceives as crossing him at any moment. Trump didn’t like a tough question from Megyn Kelly in an August 2015 debate, and for months on end he railed about her on Twitter. When Judge Gonzalo Curiel ruled against him in fraud litigation over Trump University, he spent the next week openly questioning the judge’s impartiality because of Curiel’s ethnicity. The mainstream media has been an object of Trump’s ire for the past 18 months. And since winning the election, Trump has communicated with the public mostly through Twitter — and has devoted far more tweets to lambasting “Hamilton” and “Saturday Night Live” than to his thoughts about which policies he’ll implement.
Beginning on Jan. 20, we will have a president who is so all over the map that it will be difficult to parse his remarks the way the world has, up to now, combed over what his predecessors have said. The search for meaning in Trump’s word salads won’t be easy. Indeed, an adviser to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe told Reuters that Trump’s aides informed him that “we don’t have to take each word that Mr. Trump said publicly literally.”
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