Donald Trump's 7-Eleven Gaffe

About

Donald Trump’s "7-Eleven" Gaffe was an incident in which Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump mistakenly referred to the September 11th Terrorist Attacks as “seven eleven (7/11),” an international chain of convenience stores, instead of “nine eleven (9/11),” a colloquial term used to describe the tragic event. The mistake led to many parodies and ridicule online.

Origin

On April 18th, 2016, Trump was giving a speech in Buffalo, New York. During the speech, he spoke about the effect the September 11th Terrorist Attacks had on him.^[1]

"I wrote this out, and it's very close to my heart. Because I was down there and I watched our police and our firemen down at 7/11, down at the World Trade Center right after it came down. And I saw the greatest people I've ever seen in action.

Trump's spokeswoman, Katrina Pierson, later called the gaffe a slip of the tongue.^[2]

Spread

The clip of Trump's mistake quickly circulated through the news cycle, leading to several parodies immediately, and to a bit on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

On Vine, several users posted clips of the original gaffe. The Street posted a video by user ToddDracula in which the clip of Trump fades into the 7-Eleven logo. The Vine received 30,000 loops.

The next day, Vic Berger IV created a Vine for Super Deluxe in which he edited Trumps remarks; the video received over 335,000 loops. At least 92 other videos were uploaded parodying the remarks as well.^[3]

On April 21st, Snopes declared the gaffe to be "true."^[3] Other users took to Twitter to create memes; a search for "Trump" and "7-11" returns hundreds of results. The hashtag #trump711 was a popular search on Facebook, with over 1,000 results.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References