Remember way back in the day when there was a black guy running for POTUS who used a teleprompter? Remember when the use of the teleprompter when said black guy was a measure of intellectual rigor?
Well, it’s Kind of funny to see that the guy who was calling for Barack Obama’s birth certificate and college transcripts is using one now. You know, so as to be more presidential, and well, more intelligent-sounding?
Umm, let’s just say that things didn’t go so well for Republican frontrunner Donald Trump when he gave his specifically non-specific foreign policy speech this week. As political campaigns would have it, let’s just say that all teleprompters aren’t created equal.
This from Helena Andrews-Dyer at the Washington Post:
Let’s get this out of the way first. It’s TAHN-zuh-nee-ah andnot Tahn-ZAH-nee-uh.
On Monday, Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump gave a rare foreign policy speech at the Mayflower hotel in Washington. During the real estate mogul’s 38-minute lesson plan for U.S. relations abroad, which he read from a teleprompter, Trump mispronounced the name of the east African country.
[…] When told about Trump’s verbal gaffe, White House spokesman Josh Earnest couldn’t resist the burn.
“Apparently the phonetics aren’t included on the teleprompter,” joked Earnest during his daily media briefing.
In the past, Trump has made much about his political opponents’ use of teleprompters. During a campaign stop in Georgia in October he told the crowd, “I’ve always said, if you run for president, you shouldn’t be allowed to use teleprompters. Because you don’t even know if the guy’s smart.” More recently, in January, he accused Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential front-runner, of using “the biggest teleprompters” he’d ever seen.
Double standard? Nope, nothing to see here, folks. Besides, unlike Obama, it’s not like Donald Trump was born on the African continent and would have the ability to properly pronounce the name of any country on the continent. I think expecting any more of Trump is asking too much, yes?