President Donald Trump Friday morning complained on Twitter that CNN "purposely" changed punctuation he'd used in a tweet about Rep. Adam Schiff to report that he'd spelled the word "little" wrong.
"To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle', not Liddle, in discribing Corrupt Congressman Liddle' Adam Schiff. Low ratings @CNN purposely took the hyphen out and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!"
In correcting CNN's report though, the president misspelled the word "describing" as "discribing" and said CNN had removed a hyphen, when it was an apostrophe that had been removed.
Trump has used the world "liddle'" before to insult other political rivals, but he hasn't always used the apostrophe.
In 2017, Time reported that Trump slammed then-Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., as "liddle'" Bob Corker.
"Sen. Corker is the incompetent head of the Foreign Relations Committee, & look how poorly the U.S. has done," Trump tweeted at the time. "He doesn't have a clue as the entire World WAS laughing and taking advantage of us. People like liddle' Bob Corker have set the U.S. way back. Now we move forward!"
Trump also called Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., during the 2016 Republican primaries "Liddle Marco," reports The Washington Post.
That time, though, he did not use the apostrophe.
According to the Poston Politics blog in the Palm Beach Post in Florida, Trump specified at the time that the correct spelling was indeed "liddle," not "Little Marco," as many news outlets had corrected it.
The blog says Trump explained that the spelling's double-D's added more insult to the nickname and helped to further brand his Republican rival.
"You have brand people a certain way when they're your opponents," Trump said. "Like Jeb Bush, we call him 'low-energy,' 'low-energy' … You gotta brand people. We branded."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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