Trump Calls Apple CEO Tim Cook ‘Tim Apple’
In one of the more unlikely malapropisms in presidential history, President Trump on Wednesday mistakenly referred to Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, as “Tim Apple.”
Cook appeared with Trump in Washington as part of a meeting of the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board, of which Cook is a member. Per 9to5Mac, after Cook spoke about Apple initiatives, including its “Everyone Can Code” program, Trump replied, “thank you, Tim Apple.”
This was not the first time Trump had made this exact mistake; in March of 2008, he referred to Marillyn Hewson, the CEO of Lockheed Martin, as Marillyn Lockheed, per Business Insider.
Trump is closer to Cook than he is to many other tech CEOs and has never moved to start a feud with him in the way he has with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. This has been the case despite Cook often being publicly critical of Trump policies, especially the ones related to immigration and family separations.
Trump and Cook met for dinner at Trump’s New Jersey golf club in August of 2018, per CBS News. Last April, Cook was a guest at a state dinner at the White House and met with Trump and other administration officials the next day.
Coding in education is tantamount to student success, @Tim_Cook tells @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/Gq0gmkcOP0 pic.twitter.com/pP9o5kUg2E
— AppleInsider (@appleinsider) March 6, 2019
“I’d like to start with Tim Cook, who has done an incredible job at Apple and become a friend of mine. He’s a friend because he does a great job,” Trump said of Cook at the Wednesday event, as he sat next to his daughter and White House staffer Ivanka Trump.
“He’s brought a lot of money back to the country because of the new tax law and is spending that money very wisely.”
At the meeting, Cook said that he was proud to be on the council.
“I’ve always thought that America is so special in many ways,” he said. “But at the heart of all of it is people. And that to me is what this group is about,” he added.
Trump just called Apple CEO Tim Cook “Tim Apple” pic.twitter.com/gTHHtjWvc9
— Sean O'Kane (@sokane1) March 6, 2019
Cook has been the CEO of Apple since 2011, although he had stepped in as acting CEO during multiple occasions when Steve Jobs was on leave from the company due to his health. Cook was named CEO as part of a succession plan that went into effect that August, when Jobs announced his resignation; Jobs died in October of that year.
One of the few openly gay CEOs of a Fortune 500 company, Cook publicly came out in a Bloomberg essay in 2014.
