No one really knows how to talk about all of the misspellings that have thus far characterized the Trump administration. At first, some of them simply seemed like the inevitable byproduct of late night/early morning tweeting, as when Trump described his opponent Marco Rubio Marco Antonio RubioFlorida senators pushing to keep Daylight Savings Time during pandemic Hillicon Valley: DOJ indicts Chinese, Malaysian hackers accused of targeting over 100 organizations | GOP senators raise concerns over Oracle-TikTok deal | QAnon awareness jumps in new poll Intelligence chief says Congress will get some in-person election security briefings MORE as a “leightweight chocker.”

Trump went on to talk about the “great honer” of being a debate winner and about China’s “unpresidented” military actions. So it has always seemed as if Trump had some spelling challenges.

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As Trump’s people have settled in, however, there have been a variety of other problems. The Department of Education misspelled W.E.B. DuBois’ name (as DeBois) in a black history month message — and then issued an ungrammatical follow-up tweet correcting the mistake. And the official White House inaugural photo featured an inspirational quote that read “No dream is too big, no challenge is to great.” So it is clearly not just Trump.

As a teacher, I spend a lot of time reading papers with spelling mistakes. If there are just one or two errors, I either ignore them or correct them without comment. But when there are a lot, I have been known to lower students’ grades. When I am challenged by students on this, the conversation always is the same.

The student points out that spelling mistakes are not a big deal, that I should be more interested in the quality of the ideas in the paper than in grammar, spelling, or punctuation.

I say that spelling mistakes suggest to me that the student has not taken the paper (and, by extension, my class) as seriously as he could have, and that the student’s failure to check for spelling errors is symptomatic of a failure to check for larger problems. Even if I overlooked them, future employers may not be so charitable. I am providing students with a life lesson. We both walk away from the conversation dissatisfied.

In this spirit, I offer three explanations for Trump’s spelling errors we’ve seen so far:

First, perhaps the implication here is that the people making these mistakes really don’t take things all that seriously. If it’s a waste of time to communicate with the public at all — if Trump, or his appointees, are merely going through the motions, why bother to spend time looking for spelling mistakes?

Second, perhaps they are in fact meant to be a sign that deep thoughts are being thought, and that things are moving so fast in Trump world that they cannot be held up by the need to check for mistakes. It’s the ideas that count.

And third, perhaps the whole point is to trap us, the public, in petty responses. Just as my students no doubt think I am being petty when I knock a few points off of their grades for repeated spelling errors, so Trump critics sound petty when they harp on spelling mistakes.

If you are a Trump opponent, the first explanation here may sound appealing. This is all part and parcel of the “deconstruction of the administrative state” that Steve Bannon discussed at the CPAC meeting. Take the Department of Education tweet, for instance. Betsy DeVos’ confirmation hearing was contentious, to say the least, in part because DeVos has always been a skeptic of the federal government’s role in public education.

If the Department of Education shouldn’t even exist, then it seems as if guidance from the Department of Education regarding Black History Month certainly should not be a priority. The message in part here might be that anyone can run these agencies — if the goal is to undo federal regulations in the schools, this seems like a thing anyone can do, whether or not they can spell.

This seems to fit the ethos of many of the cabinet appointments — government, Trump-style, just isn’t that hard, and it is worth reminding people of this. If that serves to undermine faith in the Department of Education, that’s part of the point.

I’m somewhat partial, however, to the second explanation. We currently have an executive branch that’s not fully staffed, that is working feverishly to implement some of the Trump agenda before the long process of legislating the bigger changes begins.

Yet this explanation — although it is perhaps a little bit more charitable — shows the risks involved in this strategy. If you’re in a hurry to do things, you make plenty of mistakes. You fail to consider how things will stand up in the courts.

You upset decades-old alliances with other countries for no particular reason. You leave the bureaucracy — be it the ICE, the Department of State, or the EPA — without clear instructions about what they should be doing. In short, the inattention to detail is not really a sign of engagement with bigger problems; instead, it masks an inattention to larger, more fundamental problems that can cripple an administration.

But then again, consider where you, the reader, are at now. You just spent a few minutes reading an article about spelling mistakes, instead of focusing on substantive policy change. This may suggest that the third explanation has some merit.

Robert G. Boatright is a professor of political science at Clark University and the director of research at the National Institute for Civil Discourse.

The views of contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.