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‘You f—— idiots’: Trump’s administration roasted for misspelling a country’s name amid deportation struggles

Ever heard of...spell check?

As President Donald Trump and his “border czar” Tom Homan continue cracking down on their promise of deporting “millions and millions” of undocumented immigrants, the Trump administration just made an embarrassing oopsies in a recent press statement.

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If having to routinely defend Donald Trump wasn’t enough of an uphill battle already, the White House’s press office has the internet cackling over a rather unfortunate spelling mistake—and it just goes to show how sloppy this administration really is.

Trump administration misspells ‘Colombia’ in now-deleted press release

One of the biggest targets of Trump’s mass deportation efforts so far has been Colombian nationals, with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) making hundreds of arrests on the heels of Inauguration Day. Despite having been one of our longest allies in Latin America, Colombia is now being threatened with tariffs and visa restrictions after President Gustavo Petro refused several military planes carrying deportees from the U.S. to land.

However, Trump made himself look a whole lot less threatening when an actual, legitimate White House press release detailing the situation in Colombia spelled the country’s name wrong. “ICYMI: President Donald J. Trump’s TRUTH on Columbia Sanctions,” the headline read. I can’t make this up. Online, people were quick to point out this error, with one user saying bluntly: “That’s not how you spell Colombia, you f***ing idiots.” Can Trump HQ not afford an editor, or…?

Predictably, Trump didn’t like being told no by Petro, hence his hard response. According to MSNBC News, Colombia has since reversed its decision and agreed to accept deportees, but Petro is still having absolutely none of Trump’s bullying tactics. “You will never rule us,” he wrote on X (Twitter). “Your blockade does not scare me, because Colombia, besides being the country of beauty, is the heart of the world.”

At the time of writing, the press release has since been corrected, but the damage has already been done. Seriously, how many hands did this official piece of government correspondence go through before being published? And what does this say about how we attain information in this country? It’s hard to say, but in any case, mistakes like these really expose the cracks in Trump’s administration.

Again, this is hardly the first time Trump’s White House has shown how little it cares about telling the truth (a.k.a. lying about how popular he was with young voters, claiming the 2020 election was ‘rigged’). So while misspelling “Colombia” as the more anglicized “Columbia” might seem like a trivial error, it does go to show how little Trump and his team care about fact-checking anything, really. Is anyone surprised?


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Amanda Landwehr
Amanda is a Los Angeles-based entertainment writer who lives and breathes Star Wars, Marvel, and all things pop culture. She has worked in digital media since 2021, covering the latest movie/TV releases, casting updates, politics, fan theories, and so, so much more. When she's not rotting away behind her laptop screen, you can typically catch Amanda maxing out her AMC Stubs membership.