Donald Trump has been dubbed a "mad king" by a political commentator who says the president is picking fights with his own administration.
After a ban on several words being featuring in internal reports, including "equality" and "at risk", Trump went a step further and has outlawed a specific font type from featuring on documents. Political commentator Timothy Noah dubbed the changes a "font fight" for the Commander in Chief and his staff. Writing in The New Republic, Noah suggested Trump had "run out of large abuses of power" and was now focusing on the minute details of his office.
Noah wrote, "...autumnal patriarchs run out of large abuses of power to initiate (indiscriminate deportations, selling pardons) and turn to petty ones. Two examples of the latter are Trump’s gilding the Oval Office and erecting a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom that dwarfs the executive mansion."
Trump has now turned his attention to typeface and banning words from internal documents. It was reported that words including "equality, inequality, underprivileged, climate science," and "at-risk" were barred from use.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio appears to have been tasked with updating font regulations in the White House too, sending an "action request" to internal members to tell them Sans Serif is now a banned font type. The memo asked workers to "restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work."
Rubio's order reverses a 2023 directive from Antony Blinken, then-President Joe Biden's Secretary of State, which "had switched to Calibri, a modern sans-serif font, saying this was a more accessible font for people with disabilities because it did not have the decorative angular features and was the default in Microsoft products."
Rubio's memo makes the change to Times New Roman as the White House's "standard typeface". Columnist Noah suggested that, while preference over typeface is understandable, making it a pressing issue while running the country was a ridiculous notion from Trump.
He wrote, "I like serifs, but I don’t make a big thing of it because, unlike the president of the United States, I have better things to do with my time."