Donald Trump's "Titties" Gaffe

Submission 9,321

Part of a series on Donald Trump. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Donald Trump's "Titties" Gaffe refers to an apparent mispronunciation of the word “cities” as “titties” made by the Republican presidential nominee while giving a speech detailing his economic policy at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan in August 2016.

Background

At around noon on August 8th, 2016, Trump delivered a speech outlining his presidential campaign’s economic policy at a campaign rally in Detroit, Michigan. While discussing the benefits of his lower business tax plan, especially for Detroit and other major cities suffering from high unemployment and low investment, Trump's utterance of the word "cities" was largely interpreted as "titties" by viewers at home and journalists alike (shown below).

Our lower business tax will also end job-killing corporate inversions, and cause trillions in new dollars and wealth to come pouring into our country – and into titties like Detroit. To help unleash this new job creation, we will allow businesses to immediately expense new business investments.

Spread

Shortly after the speech was broadcast, a clip of the "titties" gaffe was posted on the /r/EnoughTrumpSpam^[2] subreddit. The same day, BuzzFeed Politics reporter Andrew Kacsynski tweeted the video clip with the description "Look, the man said titties. There's no way around it" (shown below, left).^[4] Minutes later, the @LOLGOP^[3] Twitter feed tweeted a joke about the video clip (shown below, right). Within 24 hours, the tweets garnered upwards of 2,500 and 340 likes respectively.

That evening, The Young Turks released a video highlighting notable jokes and commentaries from Twitter users (shown below), as well as an different video recording of the same speech wherein Trump can be heard pronouncing “cities" quite clearly, which in turn led some to speculate alternative explanations of the Republican presidential nominee's spoonerism, including audio-technical issues like "mic pop."^[12] In the following 24 hours, several news sites published articles about gaffe, including Mic,^[1] The Inquisitr,^[5] Elite Daily,^[6] Mediaite,^[7] The Daily Mail, US Weekly, Boing Boing^[10] and Daily Kos.^[11]