Quick fun hit before we get into this week’s fraud and felonies: Is Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” the song of the summer? Maybe.
Is its grammar confounding listeners who just want to bop? Definitely.
I dug into Carpenter’s weird (and weirdly catchy) syntax with Samantha Allen at Condé Nast’s Them, and we had a good time with it. Read it here.
In almost-as-much-fun news: On Friday the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charged Ben F. Borgers and his eponymous auditing firm — which lists among its clients Trump Media and Technology Group — with “massive fraud affecting more than 1,500 SEC filings.” This followed a report in the Financial Times that Borgers had misspelled his own name in filings with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
Not just once. And not just one way.
Fourteen different spellings. Of his own name.
Predictably, the media had a field day.
“Trump Media’s auditor is really bad at spelling his own name,” read the headline in FT, which broke the story, and similar mockery followed in copycat news stories across the left-wing echo chamber. Most seemed to delight in pointing out another can-you-believe-how-dumb-they-are moment associated with another foundering Trump business.
But what if the misspellings weren’t accidental at all? Could they have been … strategic?
I’m not just talking about the “owning the libs” strategy. That’s too easy — even after nine years of Trump in our daily media diet, we still can’t resist a hearty meal of outrage. (Empty calories, unfortunately.)
Rather, I’m talking about a strategy of hiding and deniability: The less consistently you spell your name, the less searchable you are. As anyone knows by now, if you’re going into business with Donald Trump, reducing your searchability is just smart self-preservation.
Just ask Tim Loehmann.
In 2014, Loehmann, then a Cleveland police officer, shot and killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice. Loehmann never suffered any direct consequences.
Eight years later, the borough council of Tioga, Pa. — population 608 — hired a Timothy Lochmann to be the town’s lone police officer.
At least they thought they did. Intentionally or not, the council misspelled Loehmann’s name as Lochmann, so if any of those 608 residents wanted to Google him, the fact that he killed a 12-year-old playing with a toy gun wouldn’t come up.
Not that he was overly searchable to begin with; lethal police rarely are. Even today, Loehmann doesn’t have a Wikipedia page detailing what he did; he’s simply name-checked on the “Killing of Tamir Rice” page. Same is true of Darren Wilson, who killed Michael Brown; Daniel Pantaleo, who killed Eric Garner; Jeronimo Yanez, who killed Philando Castile; Robert Bates, who killed Eric Harris; Kimberly Potter, who killed Daunte Wright; and countless other killers who are not as searchable as their victims.
Back in Tioga, Pa., two days into his new job, Lochmann — I mean, Loehmann — resigned after his history came to light. But there’s plenty of evidence that intentional misspellings for the purpose of deceit — sometimes known as typosquatting — are becoming ever more common.
Reupping this from a 2022 Angry Grammarian column:
The Jan. 6 Committee has reminded Americans about the onslaught of lawsuits that Donald Trump’s legal team and allies filed in the weeks after the 2020 election. But we’ve largely forgotten how typo-ridden those hastily slapped-together lawsuits were. One attorney, Sidney Powell, misspelled the word district three different ways on the very first page of two different lawsuits — districct, distrcoict, and distrct — prompting some on the right to suggest the typos were intentional in order to garner more media attention. Given the decibel level of those postelection days, the suggestion doesn’t seem far-fetched.
A few weeks earlier, the New York Times ran an in-depth examination of so-called typosquatting, a method of inserting intentional typos to circumvent traditional social media efforts to filter out disinformation. The hashtag #BidenCrimeFamily was used for more than a year by conservatives hoping to impugn the future president, but once Twitter’s algorithms started weighing down false stories that featured that hashtag, Trump found a back door: A few days before the election he tweeted #BidenCrimeFamiily — with a doubled ii to evade the algorithm. The typo-laden #BidenCrimeFamiily went viral itself, allowing disinformation to spread faster than Twitter could tamp it down in the crucial last days before the election.
I’ve always thought egregious misspellings should be punishable with jail time. Turns out I was more right than I thought.