"We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple," President Donald Trump told the Apple CEO, whose name is actually Tim Cook, as the two sat side-by-side at a meeting
President Donald Trump got a little mixed up this week while praising Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Or, as Trump called him, “Tim Apple.”
In a Wednesday meeting at the White House for the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, the president sat down with daughter Ivanka Trump, Cook and others to lead a discussion about the importance of technology-related jobs and education.
Video footage from multiple sources, including The Guardian and CNBC, shows Trump praising the tech mogul for his contributions in the field before getting his name wrong while sitting right next to him.
“We’re going to be opening up the labor forces, because we have to,” said the president, 72. “We have so many companies coming in. People like Tim, you’re expanding all over and doing things that I really wanted you to right from the beginning. 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,” Trump continued. “We appreciate it very much, Tim Apple.”
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Twitter users — as usual — had many reactions to the surname snafu.
Among them was the first daughter herself: Ivanka tweeted a string of crying-laughing emoji in response to a Daily Show video rounding up previous times the president has called someone the wrong name.
“Can’t wait for the meeting with ‘Bill Microsoft’ and ‘Jeff Amazon,’ ” another user joked, referencing tech titans Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, while another wrote, referencing Mark Zuckerberg, “He’s meeting Mark Facebook tomorrow.”
“‘Please, Tim Apple is my work name. Call me Mr. iPhone,’ ” another tweeted in jest of an alternate conversation that could’ve happened behind the scenes.
Cook himself seemed to take it all in stride: Later Thursday he changed his name on Twitter to (what else?) Tim Apple — with his company’s famous logo subbing in for his last name.
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At the Wednesday White House meeting with Cook, Trump switched to discussing border control after his name, saying, “We have to bring people in. We want them to be people based on merit and we want them to come in legally — you see what’s going on at the border.”
“We are doing an amazing job considering it’s really an onslaught, very much. I call it ‘invasion.’ They always get upset when I say an invasion but it really is somewhat of an invasion,” he continued, returning to a favorite argument about a so-called “crisis” of drugs and violence at the southern border that is not broadly supported by data.
“Human trafficking is a disaster — nobody knew too much about it until recently,” Trump said. “It’s been going on for a million years, actually. It’s been going on for a long time.”