Donald Trump Appears to Have Posted the Phrase "Bela" on Truth Social By Mistake

Since he first arrived in politics in a major way, President Trump has been known, in part, for posting. First it was on X (formerly Twitter) and then his own Truth Social, but wherever he happens to be posting, his online thoughts have tended to generate plenty of news coverage and controversy.

On Aug. 17, though, Trump posted just the word "bela" to his Truth Social account, leaving many who follow him confused about what he might have meant and whether the post was intentional. Here's what we know.

Trump's post came in the morning of Aug. 17, and featured just the single word "bela." The word means "beautiful" in Italian, but that version is spelled with two Ls, not one. It's possible, of course, that the president accidentally misspelled the word while he was looking at something particularly beautiful, but it seems just as likely that the phrase was posted on accident, maybe for a reason as simple as the president had his phone open in his pocket.

This happened once during Trump's first administration, when a tweet ended with the phrase "covfefe" for no apparent reason. Plenty of people tried to riddle out exactly what happened there, but we still don't really know. For now, then, both phrases remain mysterious, although plenty of people have commented on Trump's posting of it to suggest something about the president.

Although this typo probably isn't a big deal one way or the other, plenty of Trump's enemies took it as an opportunity to suggest that this administration is particularly ridiculous.

“We broke Donald Trump,” Gavin Newsom's press office wrote in response to the tweet. Newsom's office has been intentionally trolling the president in recent weeks by posting in the style of the president.

The Lincoln Project, an organization of former Republicans who oppose Trump, suggested that Trump had just dropped the new version of “covfefe."

Unlike most politicians, President Trump clearly handles posting to his social media accounts himself, at least some of the time, which might explain how he wound up posting something so strange and innocuous.

So if you're wondering what Trump meant by "bela," the answer is that we really don't know. The most likely explanation, though, is that the president simply posted a typo as he has done before. In the grand scheme of all the actions his administration has taken, it's not the kind of thing that is going to define his legacy. What it does allow for, though, is a moment of fun on the internet.

Whether you love him or hate him, it's undeniably the case that we've never had a president remotely like Donald Trump in the history of our nation. "Bela" is not something you could imagine winding up on Joe Biden's Twitter account, or even George W. Bush's if Twitter had been around when he was president. Instead, these typos are a unique feature of Trump's version of the presidency.