Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Covfefe? Al Franken Says Trump’s Cryptic Tweet Is Yiddish For ‘Bedtime’

President Trump’s early morning tweet about “covfefe” got many in the media guessing about what the indecipherable typo referred to. But it was no mystery to Al Franken – who humorously interpreted the nonsense word as Yiddish.

“A covfefe is a Yiddish term for ‘I got to go to bed now,’” the comedian-turned-Minnesota senator joshed Wednesday morning on CNN’s “New Day” program. “I think … He got that from Jared, I guess,” he said, referring to presidential son-in-law and Orthodox Jew Jared Kushner.

In a since-deleted tweet, Trump wrote an uncompleted post-midnight tweet about “constant negative press covfefe” that got people scratching their heads and the non-word “covfefe” trending on social media.

Franken has been on a roll lately, embracing his funny side with publication of his comical memoir, “Giant of the Senate.” The satirist initially came to prominence thanks to his work on “Saturday Night Live.”

Contact Daniel J. Solomon at [email protected] or on Twitter @DanielJSolomon

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.