President Donald Trump has been ridiculed in recent days for repeatedly referring to his administration’s military siege on Iran as an “excursion,” a potential mix-up with the word “incursion,” but according to a new report from Zeteo, his aides are well aware of the blunder but refuse to correct him out of fear.
“I’m not telling him,” a Trump administration official told Zeteo on Friday, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
The word “excursion,” as explained by MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire on Friday, generally refers to “a short, organized pleasure trip, à la snorkeling,” whereas an “incursion” is a “sudden, often hostile entrance or invasion into a territory or place,” a far more appropriate term to describe the Trump administration’s operation in Iran.
And yet, despite the obvious blunder, Trump officials told Zeteo that correcting the president would be “a fool’s errand,” and that “doing so would likely get them yelled at,” the outlet reported.
“We say ‘incursion,’ the boss says ‘excursion.’ It’s not a big deal,” a second Trump official told Zeteo, also speaking on the condition of anonymity.
A third source – whom Zeteo described as a person “familiar with the matter” – told the outlet that Trump was aware that the two words had far different meanings, but that the president still “prefers ‘excursion’ and likes that it sounds like ‘incursion.’”
“Some of these sources say that they or their colleagues have used the term ‘incursion’ in front of Trump lately, but then the president just… did his own thing,” Zeteo’s report reads.