President Donald Trump is famously spelling-challenged, but this one was not his fault.
Trump is set to deliver his first State of the Union address Tuesday, and the tickets issued to lawmakers’ spouses and guests contained a glaring typo: “State of the Uniom.”
The tickets, printed by the Office of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper, had to be reissued Monday.
“It was corrected immediately, and our office is redistributing the tickets,” a spokesman for the sergeant at arms told Agence France-Presse. The office did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday evening, and it was not clear how many tickets were affected.
Lawmakers in both parties poked fun at the typo. But Democrats were more ruthless in their mockery.
Rep. Raúl M. Grijalva, D-Ariz., took the opportunity to criticize Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose office has had its own spelling problems. In a tweet last February, the Education Department misspelled W.E.B. Du Bois’ name — and two months later, the White House’s official Snapchat channel referred to DeVos as the “Secretary of Educatuon.”
“Just received my ticket for the State of the Union. Looks like @BetsyDeVosEd was in charge of spell checking," Grijalva wrote on Twitter.
The president had no involvement in the printing of the State of the Union tickets. But he has received his own share of language-related criticism over the past year, tweeting such non-words as “unpresidented,” “honered,” “hearby” and, of course, “covfefe.”
The Office of the Sergeant at Arms could have benefited from caution after Hofstra University was ridiculed for a similar error in 2016. Commemorative tickets for the first presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton misspelled Clinton’s given name with one L.
The State of the Union tickets, though, had two typos for the price of one: In addition to “Uniom,” they referred to the “Visitor’s Gallery.” It is actually the Visitors’ Gallery.