An English Teacher's Incorrect Correction of a Trump Letter Illustrates His Critics' Reflexive Conde

[EasyAce]

Let's argue about the president's policies instead of his "grammar & style."
By Jacob Sullum
http://reason.com/blog/2018/05/28/an-english-teachers-incorrect-correction

A glance at Donald Trump's Twitter feed is enough to show that the president does not have a firm grasp of punctuation and tends to capitalize words arbitrarily. By comparison, the form letter that Yvonne Mason received from Trump, which presumably was written by a staffer on his behalf, is a model of care. Yet Mason, a retired English teacher in Atlanta, thought the letter was so riddled with errors that she marked it up, posted a photo of it on Facebook, and sent the "corrected" version back to the White House. I know about this incident only because The New York Times thought it was worth a story, as part of a continuing series on what a huge doofus the president is.

Don't get me wrong. The president is a huge doofus. But Mason's markup of his letter does not reinforce that point. In fact, none of Mason's corrections is correct, although there are at least two mistakes in the letter that she neglected to note. Mason's showy but erroneous pedantry illustrates the tendency of Trump's opponents to cast policy disagreements as questions of competence and to delight in everything that reflects badly on him, even when that thing is not, strictly speaking, true. These tendencies, which mirror Trump's own fondness for ad hominem attacks and recklessness with facts, alienate potential allies while confirming his supporters' conviction that he is sticking it to a supercilious elite that holds them in contempt . . .