The act would amend the Presidential Records Act, which states that the president’s communications must be preserved for posterity and for history. The COVFEFE Act would also make it illegal for Trump to delete a tweet. Given Trump’s affinity for off-the-cuff Saturday morning and 3:00 a.m.-on-a-weeknight rants, losing the ability to delete inflammatory 140-character messages could remove a powerful “mulligan” from the president’s social media arsenal.
— Mike Quigley (@RepMikeQuigley) June 12, 2017
Some analysts have said Trump has “weaponized” his Twitter account, and the COVFEFE Act could hamstring the president when he makes ill-fated mistake to his 31.1 million followers.
When Trump tweeted “Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” many thought Trump was composing another verbal assault against the media and had meant to type "coverage."
Unwilling to admit the slightest defeat, Trump spokesman Sean Spicer defiantly told reporters, “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant.” And some right-leaning outlets, such as Big League Politics, have contended that Trump actually meant to say “I will stand up” in Arabic, citing Arabic language experts, but one is left wondering why Trump would have chosen to pull these language skills out of nowhere with no other Arabic words in the tweet to contextualize his message.
Big League Politics’ analysis may be overly generous, as it rendered Trump’s “covfefe” as “cov fe’fe” in Google’s native translator to get the translation “I will stand up.” Trump did not put a space between “cov” and “fefe” and did not include the Arabic punctuation mark in “fefe.”
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 31, 2017
Hillary Clinton now-famously told an audience at Recode’s Code Conference, “I thought it was a hidden message to the Russians.”
Trump tweeted about six hours later, at 5:09 a.m., “Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’?? Enjoy!” in what some analysts suspect was a ploy to save himself the embarrassment of having made a spelling error. The original tweet was deleted, but copies have been retained on the TrumpTwitterArchive.
“President Trump’s frequent, unfiltered use of his personal Twitter account as a means of official communication is unprecedented,” said Quigley, Congressional Transparency Caucus co-founder. “If the President is going to take to social media to make sudden public policy proclamations, we must ensure that these statements are documented and preserved for future reference. Tweets are powerful, and the President must be held accountable for every post.”
— Mike Quigley (@RepMikeQuigley) June 12, 2017
Meanwhile, one of President Barack Obama’s speech writers has teamed with a programmer to create a Twitter bot under the handle @RealPressSecBot. The bot checks Trump’s feed every five minutes, and if the president has tweeted during that span, the account automatically prints out the tweet as an official statement with the standard White House format.
