Teleprompter hater Donald Trump has decided he loves teleprompters

As recently as late May Donald Trump alleged Hillary Clinton "doesn't have her own words," as evidenced by her regular use of a teleprompter. In fact, back in August, he declared, "if you're running for president you shouldn't be allowed to use teleprompters," adding that read speeches "don't have the same vibrance" as extemporaneous remarks.

Now, he's changed his tune. "If I knew they had these teleprompters, I would have used them," Trump said in Colorado on Friday. "I'm starting to love these teleprompters. It's much easier when you have a teleprompter, and I'm getting great reviews with the teleprompters."

But Trump should be careful, as teleprompters have been known to betray even their most loyal fans. Just last week, Clinton's teleprompter script seems to have included a cue for her to sigh audibly to punctuate a point, a prompting she awkwardly interpreted as a direction to say the word "sigh."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.