President Trump left Hindus off a tweet intended to celebrate a Hindu holiday.
You just can’t make this stuff up.
Trump tweeted a collection of photographs, of the White House’s celebration of Diwali, a five-day festival common to a number of Southeast Asian religion traditions commemorating light prevailing over darkness.
While Trump accurately referred to Buddhist, Sikhs, and Jains — three religious groups that also celebrate the holiday — he omitted Hindus, the religious group with which the holiday is most closely associated, and the largest religious group to celebrate the holiday.
He also marked the holiday a week late; Diwali began on November 7.
Today, we gathered for Diwali, a holiday observed by Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains throughout the United States & around the world. Hundreds of millions of people have gathered with family & friends to light the Diya and to mark the beginning of a New Year. https://t.co/epHogpTY1A pic.twitter.com/9LUwnhngWJ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 13, 2018
Trump initially deleted his tweet before reposting it with a different link.
Neither the first nor second tweet mentioned Hindus.
A follow-up tweet, sent 17 minutes later, clarified the Hindu nature of the holiday.
There are about 1 billion Hindus in the world and about 2.25 million in North America, according to the Pew Research Center.
For a different president, such an omission might be considered little more than a faux pas.
But Trump has a history of ignoring or omitting significant groups and figures from commemorative speeches and tweets.
In the first month of his presidency, for example, he failed to specifically mention Jews during a speech he made on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A month later, during African-American History Month, Trump appeared to imply that Frederick Douglass, the black abolitionist and writer, was still alive, referring to him as someone “who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” (Douglass died in 1895.)