Opinion: What is #Covfefe

President Donald Trump has once again set Twitter ablaze, but just what is #Covfefe and why should it scare us?

Over 100 days into the presidency of Donald Trump and the world has become accustomed to strange and bizarre tweets coming from him, but last night appears to have been one of his biggest Twitter gaffs so far. His tweet at 5AM GMT read “Despite the negative press covfefe” and almost instantly it became a trending hashtag. At the time of writing this article, the tweet has been up for four hours, and has been retweeted 100,000 times with 35,000 replies.

Of course there has been the usual slew of jokes, anything from replacing song lyrics with the word covfefe, to Dungeons and Dragons style characters named Covfefe arguing over their sacred Orb, and movie quotes replaced with the word.

While it’s a great source of humour, it is perhaps also a great cause for concern. The title President of the United States of America has often been synonymous with the title Leader of the Free World, making Donald Trump one of the most powerful men on the planet, yet at midnight US time he was incapable of completing a Tweet.

Now, the most obvious answer is that he started to write another of his regular Tweets damning the press, and then thought better of it, meaning to delete the Tweet but accidentally publishing it instead. The problem with this scenario, however, is that four hours later the tweet is still there. Granted it’s the small hours of the morning in America and most of the White House staff will be asleep, but given the coverage that this tweet has received SOMEONE in the White House should have picked up on it and had it removed.

The longer the Tweet remains on-line the more inefficient the White House staff look, and given that they have been mocked excessively in recent months this is just yet another example of their ineffectiveness. President Trump has a large number of PR executives working for him whose job it is to make him look good, and yet time and again they appear to be failing in that role.

A further cause for concern is that this comes the day after the announcement that the President’s spin doctor Mike Dubke has quit his post, when 24 hours later the President needs a spin doctor more than ever. There have been conspiracy theories circling the internet for a lot of Trump’s Presidency claiming that someone in Trump’s circle is deliberately allowing these gaffs to continue to degrade Trump’s effectiveness as President, but these have yet to be proven.

There has also been another suggestion that something serious has prevented the President from either editing or removing the Tweet, which has to raise a few flags. How was that Tweet supposed to finish, given that with no context at all there is almost a thinly veiled threat towards the press implied.

One thing is certain, when the sun comes up in America the White House is going to have a busy day ahead of them trying to repair the damage that has been done by a single overnight Tweet.