President Trump said he purposely condensed the name of Apple CEO Tim Cook as “Tim Apple” as a time-saving measure during a White House meeting and blamed the “Fake News” for making him look bad for it.
“At a recent round table meeting of business executives, & long after formally introducing Tim Cook of Apple, I quickly referred to Tim + Apple as Tim/Apple as an easy way to save time & words,” Trump posted on his Twitter page. “The Fake News was disparagingly all over this, & it became yet another bad Trump story!”
The president was meeting with the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board last Wednesday when he bungled Cook’s name.
People immediately called out the slip of the tongue on Twitter, and Cook even poked fun at the president the next day by updating his Twitter profile by replacing his last name with the Apple logo.
But the White House’s official transcript of the president’s remarks at the meeting covered up the mistake, caught clearly on videotape, by using punctuation.
“I used to say, ‘Tim, you got to start doing it over here.’ And you really have. I mean, you’ve really put a big investment in our country. We appreciate it very much, Tim — Apple,” the president said, according to the White House’s version.
Creating even more confusion, Trump told Republican donors at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last Friday night that he actually said “Tim Cook Apple” really fast but didn’t accentuate the “Cook” part, according to Axios.
He said the “fake news” media just reported it as “Tim Apple.”
Axios spoke to attendees of the fundraiser who said they were perplexed why Trump would make a big deal out of it because nobody cared.
“I just thought, why would you lie about that,” a donor told Axios. “It doesn’t even matter!”
It’s not the first time Trump referred to somebody by the name of their company.
Last March at a White House event, he introduced Lockheed Martin CEO Marilyn Hewson as “Marilyn Lockheed.”