Donald Trump's Twitter assault on the English language weakens him and America One can only wish Donald Trump occasionally colluded with a dictionary before tweeting. His garbled grammar, punctuation and spelling damage America.

Christian Schneider | Opinion columnist

One must give President Trump credit where it is due: Arguing he is innocent of obstructing justice by threatening to fire the investigator looking into whether he obstructed justice is a novel strategy. It would be like an accused arsonist ordering a judge to find him innocent or he’ll burn her new car to the ground.

Yet while the president and investigators publicly wrangle over collusion, obstruction and “spying,” Trump continues his assault on something as valuable as democracy itself: the English language. As the president makes daily pronouncements on Twitter, one only wishes he occasionally colluded with a dictionary.

Surely, Trump’s supporters admire his willingness to defy convention. But when proper grammar, punctuation and spelling are treated with more enmity than Vladimir Putin, it weakens America’s standing and undercuts the force of the president’s words.

A recent Boston Globe report suggested aides who post tweets on Trump’s behalf actually add garbled syntax, unnecessary exclamation points, and random capitalization to Trump’s posts just to make them sound like the president of the United States. “Some staff members even relish the scoldings Trump gets from elites shocked by the Trumpian language they strive to imitate,” says the Globe report, “believing that debates over presidential typos fortify the belief within his base that he has the common touch.”

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For one, the debate over “typos” isn’t necessarily one about misspellings or awkward punctuation. It is a well-grounded concern that the most powerful man in the world often communicates to the world without any filter or prior review by his advisers. Certainly anyone on Twitter long enough will admit they have regretted sending certain tweets, but our inept postings likely won’t lead to a Syrian village being vaporized.

And granted, while one is unlikely to hear the Queen’s English being spoken at backyard cookouts across America this summer, the president’s official statements should adhere to a basic standard of properness and decorum. If the president aspired to be a “drain the swamp”-style rabble-rouser, it would be more palatable if he demonstrated a fifth-grade proficiency in language.

That’s not to say there wouldn’t be times where the president couldn’t defy language conventions, Tom Wolfe-style. But before one begins stuffing prose with extraneous exclamation points and random capitalization, they should at least master the basics first. International conflict is not the proper venue to feature Trump’s off-the-cuff beat poetry.

Instead, Trump’s tweets (or at least the ones he writes) portray an undisciplined, capricious mind prone to laziness and emotional outbursts. Take, for example, this gem from May 23, in which Trump tweeted:

“Look how things have turned around on the Criminal Deep State. They go after Phony Collusion with Russia, a made up Scam, and end up getting caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

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One visualizes Trump breathlessly tapping the shift button on his phone to emphasize the words “Phony Collusion.” The capital “P” and “C” are simply too much for him to resist; finally, he gives in to temptation, as if the eye-popping uppercase characters are a porn star at a golf outing. His Ivy League education (recall his declarations that he has the “best words” and “a very good brain”) begs him to use his linguistic turn signals; but making letters bigger just feels … oh so right.

In Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, Huxley argues the role of the human brain is “eliminative:” the brain essentially serves as a referee, filtering all of the body’s senses and desires to allow humans to function. In the same way, proper use of language further distills the base emotions in the brain into an orderly, understandable stream of communication.

The inability of the most powerful person in the world to adhere to even basic linguistic rules — and to brag about this lack of discipline! — should worry even Trump’s most ardent supporters. His lexical lurches toward whatever is on his mind that very second are a window into his unpredictable temperament and capricious judgment.

With his game of syntactical bumper cars, Trump highlights both the best and the worst of the American system of government. On the one hand, it demonstrates anyone can be president. On the other hand, it demonstrates that anyone can be president. Let’s just hope one day we find out he’s had an undisclosed meeting with Merriam-Webster.

Christian Schneider is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors. Follow him on Twitter: @Schneider_CM.