Trump rants nonsensically about his own spelling mistake, while confusing hyphen for apostrophe

Donald Trump has complained about coverage of his incorrect spelling of “little”, in a barely comprehensible tweet in which he confuses an apostrophe for a hyphen.

Seemingly enraged that his description of congressman Adam Schiff as “liddle” had been noted by US TV news network CNN, the president embarked on a customary early-morning Twitter tirade, in which he also misspells the word ‘describing’.

“To show you how dishonest the LameStream Media is, I used the word Liddle’, not Liddle, in discribing [sic] Corrupt Congressman Liddle’ Adam Schiff,” he said.

He went on the suggest CNN “purposely took the hyphen out [sic] and said I spelled the word little wrong. A small but never ending situation with CNN!”

On Thursday Mr Trump had attacked the Democrat chair of the House intelligence committee on Twitter, calling him “Liddle Adam Schiff”.

Mr Schiff, who is a key figure in the push to begin impeachment proceedings against the president, was leading a “Democrat scam”, the tweet added.

But today, the beleaguered leader turned his fire back onto the media, by seeming to criticise CNN for noting in their report of his original tweet that the business tycoon had misspelled the word “little”.

The garbled tweet also refers to the single apostrophe Mr Trump inserted after the word “liddle” as a hyphen, and appeared to suggest the news network had intentionally failed to mention this fact.

Mr Trump regularly uses his Twitter account to launch attacks on his political rivals and enemies, complete with insulting epithet.

He famously called to his Republican rival for the presidency Jeb Bush “low energy”, as well as “Crooked Hillary Clinton” and “Lying James Comey”.

This latest tweetstorm follows the growing scandal over his call to Ukraine's leader in which he tried to persuade him to launch an investigation into claims involving the son of Joe Biden, which has led Democrats in Congress to begin an impeachment inquiry.

Mr Biden is the current favourite to become the Democratic candidate in the 2020 presidential election and has consistently been shown in opinion polls to have a sizeable lead over Mr Trump.

A senior former prosecutor said on Thursday that Mr Biden's son, Hunter, broke no laws in his business dealings in the country.

Shortly after his confused and misspelled attack on CNN, Mr Trump tweeted further criticism of Mr Schiff, accusing him of misleading Congress when reporting part of the transcript of the president’s infamous phone call with Volodymyr Zelensky​, the Ukrainian leader.

“He was supposedly reading the exact transcribed version of the call, but he completely changed the words to make it sound horrible, an [sic] me sound guilty,” Mr Trump tweeted.

According to an memo summarising the call released earlier this week by the White House, Mr Trump pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to investigate supposed corruption by Mr Biden, whose son Hunter sits on the board of a Ukrainian gas company.

He also reminded Mr Zelensky that the United States is a significant ally of Ukraine which sent a lot of military aid to the country in its war against Russia, before asking the leader for a “favour” on the Biden issue.

Mr Biden has denied any impropriety by him or his son, and no evidence has ever been shown linking the family to corruption in Ukraine.

On Thursday Mr Schiff satirically paraphrased what he believed Mr Trump was in effect saying to Mr Zelensky:

“This is the essence of what the president communicates. ‘We’ve been very good to your country. Very good. No other country has done as much as we have. But you know what, I don’t see much reciprocity here.

“’I have a favour I want from you, though... I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent, understand? Lots of it... on this and on that.’”

It was this parody of the call which Mr Trump has reacted against, describing it in his tweets as an attempt to “defraud the American Public” and demanding Mr Schiff’s resignation.

His increasingly frequent and erratic attacks online come as Democrats in Congress continue to push for his impeachment.

In the last 24 hours it has emerged White House officials attempted to hide the transcript of the phone call on an ultra-secure computer server normally kept for the most classified national security files.

A formal written complaint by a member of the US intelligence agencies against Mr Trump’s conduct regarding Ukraine has also been made public, prompting deep concern from many Democrats and even some Republican politicians.

On Thursday Mr Trump had already hit out at the unidentified White House officials who told the intelligence officer whistleblower about the phone call, likening them to “spies” and darkly warning about what punishment such “traitors” received “in the old days”.