President Donald Trump responded to the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl victory on Sunday night by commending them for doing such a great job — on behalf of people living in the next state over.
Fox & Friends defended Trump’s embarrassing Chiefs tweet, because of course they did
Trump got an extremely basic geographical fact wrong — but some of his fans won’t even admit it.
The Chiefs play in Kansas City, Missouri. But shortly after the game ended, Trump posted a tweet lauding the team for how they “represented the Great State of Kansas.”
Twitter screengrab
Trump deleted the tweet within a matter of moments and posted a corrected one a short time later.
Still, he was roundly dragged for making such a basic error in the first place, including by Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI):
And by others who joked about Trump once again breaking out his Sharpie in a ham-handed effort to correct an error:
Even the Kansas City, Missouri, police department had a bit of fun with the situation:
Trump’s mistake obviously isn’t the end of the world, even if it did betray a tragicomical level of ignorance about the country he’s governing. But if you thought that getting such a basic fact wrong would be impossible even for Fox & Friends to defend, think again.
Steve Doocy, host of the president’s favorite morning show, brought up the tweet but tried to explain Trump’s error away.
“Kansas City is in Kansas and it is also in Missouri ... [It’s like when] people call them the New York Giants, but they’re in New Jersey,” Doocy said, referring to the fact that the New York Giants football team actually plays in East Rutherford, New Jersey.
While it’s true that there’s a Kansas City, Kansas, just across the Missouri River from the much larger Kansas City, Missouri, the Chiefs are based in Missouri and have been since 1963. They’ve never played in Kansas. This isn’t a distinction that casual NFL watchers or knowers of Midwestern geography typically get wrong. So Doocy’s Spicer-esque explanation for Trump’s tweet doesn’t really hold water — and he wasn’t the only MAGA enthusiast to use that talking point.
The irony of Trump messing up such a basic geographical fact is that just a week ago, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was in the news for challenging a reporter who asked him questions he didn’t like to locate Ukraine on an unmarked map. It appears he should save a geography lesson or two for his boss.
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