Let's just call Donald Trump's Kentucky Derby tweet performance art

2025-04-27 12:32:03admin

Donald Trump's Twitter feed stopped mattering long ago.

Sure, it's his always-online bully pulpit. He uses it daily to attack enemies and hand down various decrees. But when you strip away all the bluster, Trump is a feckless leader who constantly undermines his own agenda with lies and hatred.

The majority of America sees it at this point (did we ever not?). It's our national embarrassment.

Every once in a while, though, Trump tweets something so outlandish, so wrong-headed, and so downright nonsensical that it's impossible to ignore. Sunday, May 5 brought us one such tweet.

(He deleted it, as is the custom when there's a Trump tweet typo, but this is what screenshots are for. The replacement tweet is otherwise the same.)

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Credit: screenshot by mashable

Yes, he misspelled the "Kentucky" in Kentucky Derby. And yes, he weirdly called the winning horse Country House's surprise upset victory -- the product of a post-race disqualification -- an example of "political correctness." (NPR's Linda Holmes had a thoughtful explanation for that.)

There's also a magical self-own here in Trump stridently declaring that "The best horse did NOT win." His legions of critics have been shouting words to that effect since Nov. 2016.

This is like the perfect storm of Donald Trump tweets, a blast of text that so perfectly nails the relentless idiocy of this president and his ideas, it may as well have come from a parody account. (I double-checked. It did not.)

It doesn't even really matter how people reacted. We're more than two years into this thing and all the good jokes have been made. But watching the people of Twitter grapple with this unhinged rant's intrusion into their Sunday morning is the only real reward we get for tuning into Trump Twitter.

So let's have at it.

Tweet may have been deleted

The best shade is the subtle shade. Dictionary.com wins this time, with a tweet posted one hour after the "Kentuky" incident.

Tweet may have been deleted

UPDATE: May 5, 2019, 12:21 p.m. EDT Added a screenshot of Trump's original, now-deleted tweet and linked out to the corrective tweet, in which "Kentucky" is no longer misspelled.

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