Steve Bannon’s departure has impacted Donald Trump in one surprising way no one saw coming

| 1:27 am EDT August 25, 2017
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I’ve admittedly taken a bit of a victory lap for having predicted two and a half weeks before Steve Bannon’s firing that he’d be gone within three weeks. But here’s something I didn’t see coming and, in hindsight, probably should have. Bannon’s departure has impacted Trump and his White House in a number of predictable ways, yet the most plainly visible impact is a bit of a shocker.

We all know by now that Donald Trump has literacy problems. It’s not just that he’s a poor speller; it’s that he’s consistently tripped up by homophones and the like. For instance back in March we saw him tweet “hear by” only to delete it and replace it with “hearby” before someone on his staff has clued him in that the correct word is “hereby.” Yet for a long while over the summer, Trump almost completely stopped making these kinds of mistakes. Either someone had begun proofreading his work before he tweeted it, or someone had begun ghost-tweeting for him.

As Palmer Report documented at the time, there was also a stretch over the summer in which a number of other hints suggested that Trump’s tweets were indeed being written and posted by a ghostwriter who was doing a fairly poor job of imitating him. The impostor would tweet about “e-mail” when Trump himself consistently spells it “email” without the hyphen, and so on. I never could pin down just who might have been ghost-tweeting on Trump’s behalf. And right about now you’re asking what this has to do with Steve Bannon.

In the week since Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House, Donald Trump has suddenly resumed making these kinds of screw-ups on Twitter. On Saturday – his first day without Bannon in the building – he infamously used the word “heel” four times in a row when he meant “heal.” Then yesterday he twice tweeted “to bad” when he meant “too bad.” Trump is clearly once again working without his Twitter proofreader and/or ghostwriter. And based on the timing, the logical conclusion is that it was Bannon. If you find Palmer Report valuable, make a donation.