Donald Trump screws up and endorses the wrong candidate

| 6:04 pm EDT August 3, 2018
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Donald Trump has been endorsing a number of candidates in various Republican primary elections lately. Based on the results, it’s debatable as to whether or not he’s been able to steer his supporters toward voting for his preferred Republican candidates over the other Republican candidates. But yesterday Trump managed to find a surefire way not to succeed in his efforts, when he endorsed the wrong candidate.

Yesterday Trump posted a tweet encouraging his followers to go out and vote for Ohio Republican Steve Stivers on Tuesday, August 7th. The trouble: Stivers isn’t even on the ballot in the August 7th primary. He already won his primary race awhile ago. Instead, the August 7th vote is a different primary race for a different office entirely. Trump ended up deleting the tweet as if nothing had happened, and replacing it with an endorsement of Troy Balderson, who is in fact on the ballot this Tuesday. So what does this tell us?

Donald Trump has been tweeting a number of these kinds of endorsements and get-out-the-vote messages, and they all come across in such boilerplate fashion, it’s unlikely that Trump is writing or posting any of them. So this screw up can probably be blamed on Trump’s staff, as opposed to Trump’s own rotting brain.

But this is the latest reminder that Trump has assembled the most unqualified and incompetent White House staff of all time. It also tells us that either he’s not bothering to sign off on what his staffers are posting to his Twitter account, or he has no idea who these candidates are anyway, or both. In any case, this kind of buffoonery doesn’t exactly instill confidence in Trump’s ability to move the needle for these candidates by endorsing them. In fact he just turned Steve Stivers, who will be on the ballot again in the general election into November, into a national punchline.