A Donald Trump-related political website tried to make cheap jokes about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in its error message. But it couldn’t even do that correctly.
The revelation came to a grateful world by Christopher Igraham of The Washington Post.
The website of Donald Trump, who has spent several days in a row at the golf course, is coded to serve up the following message in the event of an internal server error: https://t.co/zrWpyMXRcz pic.twitter.com/wiQSQNNzw0
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 28, 2017
You may have noticed that the code is written to display the following message in the event of an error:
“Oops! Something went wrong. Unlike Obama, we are working to fix the problem… and not on the golf course.”
As Paul Glenn from Vice pointed out, the intended burn will never be seen by its intended audience because of an error in the JavaScript.
It will never actually serve that message, there's an error in the JavaScript…any error will give the 404 message because they used assignment (=) instead of equality (==) pic.twitter.com/un8LJM9Fsu
— Paul Glenn (@pdglenn) December 28, 2017
Ingraham continued his reporting on the issue over the subsequent two days.
That snippet of code appears to be on all https://t.co/dkhw0AlHB4 pages, which the footer says is paid for by the RNC? pic.twitter.com/oaZDT126B3
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 28, 2017
It's also all over https://t.co/ayBlGmk65Z. As others have noted in this thread, this is weird code and it's not clear it would ever actually display, but who knows.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 28, 2017
UPDATE: The golf error message has been removed from the Trump and GOP websites. They also fixed the javascript "=" vs "==" problem. Still not clear when these messages would actually display, since the actual 404 (and presumably 500) page displays a different message pic.twitter.com/Z7dmyQ5smy
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2017
That suggests someone at either RNC or the Trump admin is sensitive enough to Trump's golf problem to make this issue go away quickly once people noticed. You have no idea how much I'd love to see the email exchange that led us here.
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) December 29, 2017
One major irony here: Although Trump frequently took jabs at Barack Obama’s golf playing habits while his predecessor was in office, as of last month Trump had played golf 35 times since taking office — and that’s only counting the occasions which were confirmed by third parties, since Trump’s staffers have refused to confirm when the president plays golf.
Trump went golfing nearly 50 percent more than Obama did in his first year.
The website link provided by Christopher Ingraham has now been fixed and includes an informal survey about Trump’s performance as president so far. Interestingly, when asked to rate the comparative performances of Obama and Trump in office, the website only offers the options of “great,” “good,” “okay” and “other” for Trump — but adds the option “poor” for Obama.
Another question reads, “Do you believe the Fake News Media will fairly cover President Trump’s first year approval rating?”
