Trump blunders: From Covfefe to ‘Thighland’ – some of the president’s most embarrassing gaffes

Since entering the White House in 2017, Donald Trump has committed a series of embarrassing blunders.

The president, like George W. Bush before him, has developed a reputation for dropping clangers while delivering speeches and addressing the media.

Here, we bring you some of Donald Trump’s most embarrassing gaffes of all time.

This one happened during a campaign rally in 2016, before Trump took office. But it’s too outrageous not to include.

The 9/11 terror attack was an event that changed the course of history.

Almost two decades later, few can forget the harrowing images of two planes careering into the World Trade Centre, killing thousands and starting a long and protracted war, the effects of which are still being felt across the world today.

You would think, then, that a man running for the most powerful office in the world would be clued up on when the atrocity took place? Not the Donald.

“I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down there on 7/11,” Trump told his at the rally in Buffalo, New York.

“Down at the World Trade Centre, right after it came down, I saw the greatest people I’ve ever seen in action”.

During a speech at a Whirlpool factory in Ohio, the president managed to get the name of an entire country wrong. No small feat, even for a man who once spelt his own wife’s name incorrectly (see below).

Trump referred to a place called “Thighland”, when complaining about US corporations moving jobs abroad.

Perhaps the president experienced a Freudian slip, with his unconscious mind bringing him back to a gentleman’s club he once visited? Who knows.

Anyhow, we’re pretty sure Thighland isn’t even a country, or a word, for that matter.

We mentioned this one earlier; here are the full details.

In May 2019, Trump’s beloved wife Melania was admitted to hospital for a week to have treatment for a kidney condition.

Trump welcomed the first lady back to the White House with a celebratory tweet.

“Great to have our incredible First Lady back home in the White House,” he wrote. “Melanie is feeling and doing really well. Thank you for all of your prayers and best wishes!”

Top marks for the thought Donald, not so much for the spelling.

“I left Texas, and I left Florida, and I left Louisiana, and I went to Puerto Rico,” Trump said at a press conference in October 2017, addressing the devastation caused by hurricane Mariah a few weeks previous.

“And I met with the president of the Virgin Islands,” Trump added, seemingly unaware that the Virgin Islands is a US territory, making him their president.

We can only assume that he intended to say that he had met with the governor of the Virgin Islands.

But if the proceeding three years are anything to go by, you might not want to rule out Trump having a meeting with himself in the future.

An instant classic that baffled the world for days. This one speaks for itself.

One of Trump’s most infamous Twitter typos happened when he described China seizing a US Navy drone as an “unpresidented” act.

He subsequently rectified the tweet, changing the spelling to unprecedented, but not before eagle-eyed Twitter users spotted the original mistake.

At a White House press briefing, Mr Trump inaccurately claimed that the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic helped end WWII – a conflict that didn’t even start until two decades later.

White House officials later said that the president had been referring to WWI, which ended in the same year that the pandemic started.

But whether the flu did bring an end to the war, as Trump suggested, is up for debate.

“It struck all the armies and might have claimed toward 100,000 fatalities among soldiers overall during the conflict while rendering millions ineffective,” according to academics Peter C Wever and Leo van Bergen.

“Yet, it remains unclear whether 1918 pandemic influenza had an impact on the course of the First World War.”