In our days of social media, the power of Twitter trolls can strike anyone from the wannabe to the celebrity. Betsy DeVos, the newest Secretary of Education in US has become a recent example of this hypothesis. A tweet on her official handle congratulating Donald Trump, the 45th President of the United States on his inauguration ceremony went awry when around 1.4 thousand twitterati trolled her for her incorrect grammar use. 

The original tweet on January 20, 2017, shown below, was edited by the twitterati and was later changed by DeVos’s staff. 

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However, the trolling didn’t just stop at that. It crossed the bounds of grammatical errors, entering dimensions of her incapabilities as an Education Secretary. There were tweets questioning her private school education and her support for charter schools. 

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Some tweets moved ahead judging the idea of Trump as a President and asked DeVos to move back to an unwelcoming Michigan.

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Hours later, although the original tweet was changed by DeVos, it was still the ire of grammar nazis online who found a persistent unchanged error. Putting out another tweet holding her staff responsible for the previous tweet and calling them ‘only human’ to have made the error, brought her no respite. Her followers seemed even more enraged with her for placing blame on her staff. 

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Despite such rage and outburst on social media, the American population is still stuck with the outcomes of a surprising 2016 election that brought Trump to power and made DeVos the Education Secretary. While no Indian twitterati was found trolling DeVos during this time, is there any chance of the DeVos appointment going the way Smriti Irani’s term as Union Minister for Human Resource Development went? Only time will tell…