Civics fail: Carly Fiorina mistakenly calls "English the official language of the U.S."

Fiorina follows Donald Trump's lead for an English-only 2016 campaign without checking a basic fact

By Sophia Tesfaye

Senior Politics Editor

Published September 3, 2015 4:09PM (EDT)

  (AP/Andrew Harnik)
(AP/Andrew Harnik)

As we've seen all summer, when you run for president against Donald Trump you are lucky to get any media attention at all and you should expect to be asked a question about Donald Trump when you do finally get that media opportunity. Perhaps it's this uncomfortable phenomenon of having to respond to the latest ridiculous stunt or statement from The Donald every time a Republican presidential candidate gets a chance to sell his own campaign that has led nearly every GOP presidential aspirant to swear off discussing the GOP frontrunner.

That may be the course taken by some of the men but the only woman vying for the Republican nomination, Carly Fiorina, has taken no such tack and thus has now revealed a fundamental ignorance about the United States in an attempt to respond to Trump's latest diss aimed at Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush.

After Bush proclaimed Trump was no true conservative in Spanish, Trump chided the former Florida governor for failing to "set the example by speaking English while in the United States.”

In an interview with CNN's New Day, Fiorina responded to the obligatory question about the latest development in the Trump vs. Jeb saga, seemingly siding with Trump and mistakenly deeming English the official language of the United States.

"I admire the fact that Jeb Bush is multilingual. I admire the fact that so many people are multilingual, and I also think English is the official language of the United States," Fiorina told CNN before ranting about securing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Of course, the U.S. has no official language but we can thank Donald Trump for revealing Fiorina's ignorance on that very basic fact.

h/t: Huffington Post


By Sophia Tesfaye

Sophia Tesfaye is Salon's senior editor for news and politics, and resides in Washington, D.C. You can find her on Twitter at @SophiaTesfaye.

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Carly Fiorina English English Only Gop Gop 2016