President Donald Trump has a way with words that often makes him sound foolish to many viewers.
His charismatic gift of gab allowed him to dominate real estate, reality television, and some political conversations over the last five decades.
Business rewarded his bravado. Yet the tactics that worked then have struggled to carry the same weight in the White House.
Trump is known to take credit for or claim he invented commonly used words.
The latest example came during his televised rally at Wheeler High School in Marietta, Georgia on Wednesday, July 22.
Trump traveled to the Peach State to back up Rep. Mike Collins in the Republican candidate’s U.S. Senate race against Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff.
Nearly an hour into his speech, Trump launched into another tirade against Central American migrants, a frequent target of his presidential campaigns.
“Remember the word I made up, the caravans. They came in. Thousands and thousands came by caravan,” Trump said to the crowd assembled in the Cobb County school building.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the earliest recorded use of the word “caravan” dates to 1588, over 420 years before Trump first ran for president in 2016.
“YOU made up caravans? Dodge would like a word. They’ve been making them since the 80s,” a Thread user pointed out, referring to a series of minivans manufactured by Chrysler.
A second individual expressed, “Trump’s ignorance is on full display in this ranting speech.” Another shocked poster commented, “OMFG, he thinks he made up the word caravans! WOW!”
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“He really has never had conversations with normal people, has he? All these regular words he thinks he made up [are] so strange!” someone wondered.
Trump’s fans caught heat when one person wrote, “He made up a word that’s in the dictionary. Do you think the stupid people listening to him know that? I doubt they know what a dictionary is.”
Earlier in his speech on Wednesday, Trump went on an extended tangent about prescription drug prices and health care costs, specifically mentioning the “fat drug.”
Earlier in his speech, Trump veered into an extended tangent about prescription drug prices.
He described an unnamed “fat” friend who supposedly paid $87 for medication in London that cost $1,400 in the United States.
“I told you I have a friend of mine. He’s fat, you never saw a guy like this. He’s a very smart guy,” the president stated as the audience broke out in laughter.
Trump has told this story many times in different ways, leading many to suspect he was talking about himself.
“He said, ‘What the hell kind of a deal? I’m paying like almost 10 times as much.’ I said, ‘That’s the system,’” Trump recalled. “But it really awoken me, and I said, ‘I got to do something about it because he’s right.’”
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While “awoken” is a dictionary-recognized word, Trump still faced online ridicule for how he used the past participle of awake in his rambling address.
“He failed middle school English,” read a response on Threads to a clip of the president’s comments. Additionally, one troll joked, “Give him a break. ‘Awakened’ is three syllables.”
A third account declared, “This idiot really has no grasp of the English language.” Trump’s brand of right-wing politics was skewered when a poster wrote, “I thought woke was an evil word.”
Between claiming he invented “caravan” and his “awoken” grammar screw-up, the commander in chief left the door open to being mercilessly mocked on social media.
Since taking office last year, Trump has also been called out for wrongfully insisting he created words like “equalizing.”
The “Art of the Deal” author did make up “mutilization,” which seems to be an accidental mixture of the real words “mutilation” and “utilization.”
Plus, critics accuse Trump of recently discovering “dumb” has the letter b at the end, because the word has become one of his favorite insults for the Democratic Party.
On the flipside, the president apparently believed modern Democrats came up with “affordability” as an attack on his policies, despite the word having a lineage back to the 1600s.
