President Trump

Social media was trying to make sense of Donald Trump early Wednesday, after a nonsensical late-night tweet set off a storm of jokes about the U.S. president.

The Twitter post, sent shortly before midnight local time, reads “inspite the negative press covfefe,” in an apparent reference to the press coverage that Trump has often derided as “fake news.”

The post was still available more than three hours after it appeared on his feed and no clarification has been given.

Using the hashtag “covfefe,” Twitter users speculated over the reasons behind the tweet. Was the president tired? Or drunk? Or had he perhaps just given away a secret nuclear code?

Taking aim at Trump’s controversial relations with Russia, one woman on Twitter quipped that she had translated #covfefe into Russian, attaching a doctored image that showed the gibberish word to be a translation of “I resign.”

Before long, the word had its own Urban Dictionary definition: “When you want to say ‘coverage’ but your hands are too small to hit all the letters on your keyboard.”

(dpa/NAN)