Twitter Dragged Trump After He Said He “Met With The President Of The Virgin Islands”
It's probably difficult to surprise you when it comes to what President Trump says these days, but, boy, he won't stop trying. Trump recently gave a speech at a conservative summit, and he made sure to mention his work to help places like Texas, Florida, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands recover from Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria. As he was talking, though, he made quite a gaffe concerning his presidential reach, and these tweets about Trump not knowing he is the president of Virgin Islands will make you cringe.
According to Teen Vogue, Trump was speaking to a crowd of conservatives when he started talking about hurricane relief efforts. In his speech, he was detailing how he visited the affected areas in the U.S. when he said:
I left Texas, and I left Florida, and I left Louisiana, and I went to Puerto Rico, and I met with the president of the Virgin Islands.
You might not catch the error immediately, but once you remember your geography class days, you'll recall that the Virgin Islands are a U.S. territory. So, that means Trump is the president of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Trump did, in fact, meet with the governor of the U.S. Virgin Islands, but his failure to show that he understands how the U.S. Virgin Islands are governed is where the focus is now — and rightly so.
The White House released a transcript of the speech that showed the word "president" was replaced with "governor."
It's not really an acceptable mistake to make when you're the president because, well, you should know what your job entails. When you hold the highest office of power in the United States, step one should probably be to understand that you are president of more than just 50 states.
Twitter made sure to point out the error right away.
This error has more far-reaching implications than just a startling lack of knowledge. With places like Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands struggling to get back to any sort of normalcy after being devastated by Hurricanes Irma and Maria, there has been a slower call to action to help them than in places like Texas and Florida.
These islands are U.S. territories with struggling American citizens, and the stagnant relief response is not helping to show that they're a top priority.
Even though the thought that the president of the United States doesn't know the entirety of what makes up the United States and its territories is unsettling, some people just had to laugh.
Sometimes you just need a meme to help you get through it.
Others thought maybe a mirror was involved in the meeting.
A user suggested that the president likes to pick and choose what's important to know about America.
This error comes on the heels of reports that Trump reportedly didn't know about the 25th Amendment. The report came from a Vanity Fair article that said Steve Bannon explained to President Trump that he should be worried about the 25th Amendment, which states that a majority of the Cabinet can remove the president from office if they deem him unfit to carry out the duties of the office. According to the article, when Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump reportedly replied with, "What's that?"
Now, unless you've just learned it in school, the average American probably can't recite the contents of the 25th Amendment off the top of their head. The thing is, the average American is not the president of the United States. If you're going to run for the highest office in the land, you should probably brush up on important documents, such as the United States Constitution.
It is definitely troubling to see the president of the United States continually reveal large gaps in his knowledge of the position, and this is likely not the last of it. Thankfully, Twitter will always be here to set the record straight.