SpaceNoodleIt’s certainly some light title gore.
TheTechnician27It certainly is not, unless you also think “I’m going to make you a pie” is me literally threatening to turn you into a pastry.
OK, fine, it’s medium title gore.
If your takeaway from that headline, given what I will afford you are two technically semantically correct options, is that the POTUS, for literally the first time in history, is acting as a member of their own cabinet and not just that they’re replacing a member thereof, it’s not incumbent on the Associated Press to account for that. I’m consistently baffled at how much people will blame news headlines for their own functional illiteracy and then refuse to even peek into the article for five seconds to check.
To read the title that way at first is a brain fart; to still be confused after stopping and thinking for a second is stupidity. To not check the article afterward is willful ignorance.
… is that the POTUS, for literally the first time in history …
To be fair, there are a lot of things Trump has done that were firsts for the office. I initially misread the headline too, simply because I wouldn’t be surprised if Trump did something absurd like replacing Noem with himself. Because he does a lot of absurd things that have never been done by a US president before. I understood it correctly after reading more, but if someone’s misreading the headline as something bizarre, it’s probably because every headline is bizarre nowadays.
I understand what you’re saying, and it’s at that point any media-literate person (you) thinks: “Hmm, I’ll just check the article and clear this up.” To even get to that point, you’d not just have to buy Trump would try to do that (I don’t, but I see how someone could); much more importantly, you’d have to assume the headline, for some godforsaken reason, isn’t taking into account how unusual it is and therefore being crystal clear that Trump is trying to insert himself in the role.
Reading the headline that way is already an enormous leap that basically only makes semantic sense, but refusing to follow up on that interpretation is where I draw the line between someone who didn’t understand at first and tried to and someone who actively chose not to understand. The latter I’ve run out of patience for over the last decade; the former show strong character through how they respond to a mistake.