Trevor Noah has a good laugh over 'covfefe,' then makes a serious point about Trump

(Image credit: Screenshow/YouTube/The Daily Show)

published 1 June 2017

If we generously set the statute of limitations for "covfefe" jokes at 24 hours, Hillary Clinton made it in just under the wire, and so did Trevor Noah. "I don't know about America, but Donald Trump has definitely made Twitter great again — say what you want," he said on Wednesday's Daily Show. "And I'm just going to enjoy this moment," when "people were searching 'covfefe' on the internet like it was a Kim Kardashian nude." People have different theories on why President Trump left an unfinished late-night tweet ending in a nonsense word up for six hours before deleting it, and Noah offered his own, involving couch cushions, CNN, jet lag, and Obama's birth certificate.

"As much as 'covfefe' was a gaffe, it must have been nice for the White House to have a Trump blunder that, for a change, didn't threaten national security," Noah said. "And more importantly, it provided welcome distraction from the fallout that came from his recent foreign trip." The Trump team, of course, just created its own narrative of the Trump trip, and it involved a lot of superlatives and Sean Spicer. "Did you see how incredible that was?" he asked after a highlight reel of Spicer obsequiousness. "Not only is the administration ignoring all the criticism of the trip, they're basically saying it was the greatest presidential trip of all time."

He illustrated his point with a restaurant analogy, then explained why Spicer, with a straight face, can "say that Donald Trump now is the patron saint of diplomacy: Well, it's because he knows that there's a large part of the population — you may know them as Republicans — who believe that Donald Trump is far more credible than most news outlets." So when Trump says Obama wiretapped him, they believe it, Noah said, and "if Trump says 'covfefe,' look, they don't know what it means, but damnit, they believe it. Trump's whole political career has taught him that he doesn't need anybody's reality but his own." He ends with a bit of his own imagined reality — a Gandhi-Ellen chimera — and maybe with this ends covfefe covfever? Watch below. Peter Weber

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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.