POOR Trump. Everybody’s laughing at his so-called “pour” spelling. Or at least JK Rowling is. She laughed so much at his objection to the way people “pour over” his tweets for errors that she filled a whole tweet with “hahaha”s.

The correct phrase, of course, should be “pore over”, which wouldn’t be the most hilarious mistake in the world were it not being made by the President of the United States, and in the middle of a tweet that starts with the words, “After having written many bestselling books and somewhat priding myself on my ability to write…”

The problem here is that, actually, in today’s world, NO ONE CARES. Well, I exaggerate in a Trumpian manner. Some people, Rowling included, do care. But there are plenty who don’t give a flying fig about spelling errors like these, or, indeed, whether Trump wrote his books himself.

In fact, for many of the president’s supporters this poor spelling is a sign of his authenticity, a signal that he writes his tweets himself. Better a misspelt tweet or two – however outrageous, irresponsible or politically destructive – than something that’s been through the spin dryer of a press office. We live in an age of increasing disregard for the old types of literacy. Moan about a person’s punctuation and you’re most likely to come across as an elite bore. Object to capital letters and you seem a pedant. On one level I sympathise with this view. We should be listening to what people have to say, rather than pulling apart their sentence constructions. But, there’s a danger in going to the other extreme – a belief that every busting of a grammatical rule signals a connection with truth.

For breaking with conventions is the order of the day. That’s the case in all of the more populist areas of politics – and it’s part of our daily entertainment. It’s also why so many people loved Danny Dyer standing up to Brexit on Good Evening Britain. The Eastenders actor called David Cameron a “tw**” and “geezer” and there was a twitter round of applause. Here, was a Remainer with the kind of colourful disregard for formalities that seemed to have previously been owned by the Leave crowd.

Trump, meanwhile, didn’t come out of nowhere. The US got a president for these times – one who, according to Michael Wolff’s Fire And Fury, spends evenings in front of three screens of television, eating cheeseburgers and talking to people on the phone. One who likes bullet points over long, detailed reports. One who some say doesn’t read, and others say can’t read.

And Trump is not alone. He’s just a symptom of a long-term trend, away from a belief in literacy, which was described in a number of books published long before he was inaugurated. It was analysed, for instance, in a 2010 book, Empire Of Illusion: The End Of Literacy And The Triumph Of Spectacle by Chris Hedges. It was also there in Amusing Ourselves To Death, a 1985 study by Neil Postman, which argued that media’s transition from a linear format based on words, to a more picture-based format, would have a profound impact on society, making it harder to communicate ideas, but easier to convey emotions.

Trump is the spectacle. His tweet errors are part of it – something for us to laugh at. For bad spelling is a form of entertainment. (I get some of my best laughs from some of my mum’s predictive text mistakes.) But, we should remember that even as we laugh at Trump, it’s not helping. It’s just another way of amusing ourselves to death.

IF you are a parent reading this on your mobile whilst ignoring your kids as they half strangle each other on the sofa, you might want to put it down right now. For, the news that us mums and dads knew was coming but chose to ignore has arrived. A report by University of Michigan Medical School has shown that parents’ excessive mobile phone use is linked to increased behavioural problems amongst children. Yes, parents – us – not the kids and their excessive screen-time, are the problem.

Now, I like to think I’m not a mobile phone addict, but I have to confess I read the report on my phone with my child sitting there beside me, asking if I would play a good old-fashioned game of noughts and crosses, which I fobbed off because I was “too busy”. It’s also sad to say that one of my children’s favourite impressions of me is a mime of me swiping a phone screen with an inane grin on my face that makes me look like an emoticon.

But, before we all shift our moral panic from child screen-time anxiety to parental phone fixation, before it becomes another stick to beat mothers with, let’s recognise that this isn’t a child or parent problem, but a people problem. We are all distracted. We all spend too long on our phones, and the evidence is stacking up to say it’s not good for us. Face time, in all things, is the answer, not screen time.