President Donald Trump says he’s replacing his embattled Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and will nominate in her place Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin.
… is that the POTUS, for literally the first time in history …
To be fair, there are a lot of things Trump has done that were firsts for the office. I initially misread the headline too, simply because I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump did something absurd like replacing Noem with himself. Because he does a lot of absurd things that have never been done by a US president before. I understood it correctly after reading more, but if someone’s misreading the headline as something bizarre, it’s probably because every headline is bizarre nowadays.
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s at that point any media-literate person (you) thinks: “Hmm, I’ll just check the article and clear this up.” To even get to that point, you’d not just have to buy Trump would try to do that (I don’t, but I see how someone could); much more importantly, you’d have to assume the headline, for some godforsaken reason, isn’t taking into account how unusual it is and therefore being crystal clear that Trump is trying to insert himself in the role.
Reading the headline that way is already an enormous leap that basically only makes semantic sense, but refusing to follow up on that interpretation is where I draw the line between someone who didn’t understand at first and tried to and someone who actively chose not to understand. The latter I’ve run out of patience for over the last decade; the former show strong character through how they respond to a mistake.
To be fair, there are a lot of things Trump has done that were firsts for the office. I initially misread the headline too, simply because I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump did something absurd like replacing Noem with himself. Because he does a lot of absurd things that have never been done by a US president before. I understood it correctly after reading more, but if someone’s misreading the headline as something bizarre, it’s probably because every headline is bizarre nowadays.
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s at that point any media-literate person (you) thinks: “Hmm, I’ll just check the article and clear this up.” To even get to that point, you’d not just have to buy Trump would try to do that (I don’t, but I see how someone could); much more importantly, you’d have to assume the headline, for some godforsaken reason, isn’t taking into account how unusual it is and therefore being crystal clear that Trump is trying to insert himself in the role.
Reading the headline that way is already an enormous leap that basically only makes semantic sense, but refusing to follow up on that interpretation is where I draw the line between someone who didn’t understand at first and tried to and someone who actively chose not to understand. The latter I’ve run out of patience for over the last decade; the former show strong character through how they respond to a mistake.