Mad King Trump’s Latest Peeve: Sans Serif Fonts

Rubio’s December 9 cable (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman’s 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”) argued that “switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.” Oh, please. The only degradation here is Rubio’s own in pandering to Trump’s pettiest prejudices. Times New Roman, Rubio wrote in his memo, “aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive.” That executive order was Trump’s warning to the diplomatic corps that if you don’t play ball, he’ll fire your ass. I guess Rubio’s point in citing it was that if you continue to use Calibri, he’ll fire your ass.

The irony, of course, is that when it comes to reading, Trump could use all the DEI assistance he can get. That’s been evident for some time; see, for instance, this hilarious 1987 clip where Trump first says that he hasn’t read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says he “really liked Tom Wolfe’s last book,” which was The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says Wolfe’s “done a beautiful job” with “his current book”; then confirms that he means The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says, “I really can’t hear with this earphone by the way.” In 2016, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” In 2016, Megyn Kelly asked Trump to name the most recent book he’d read. Trump’s reply: “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time.” People have speculated for years that Trump is dyslexic. The big headlines on his White House website now have serifs, but much of the text does not. Has Trump even noticed?

In initiating a crusade against sans serif type, Trump appears to be telling us: “I’ve never read my briefing books, and I don’t intend to start now. But I like how things look, and serifs look better, and if that creates problems for handicapped people I don’t care.”