Trump just offended over a billion Hindus with embarrassing Diwali celebration tweet

President Trump has never had much use for religion except as a vehicle to attract support from conservative evangelical Christians who are seemingly oblivious to the fact that nearly his every behavior violates the teachings they supposedly hold so deep in their hearts.

It was not surprising, therefore, when the President was forced to send out a second tweet about his participation in a ceremony at the White House celebrating one of the biggest holidays in India and throughout South Asia. The initial tweet included photos of the President with members of the White House staff of Indian descent, as well as the Indian Ambassador to the U.S., lighting the traditional Diya lamp marking Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights.

The followup tweet was necessary because the president initially described the holiday as being “observed by Buddhists, Sikhs, and Jains throughout the United States & around the world,” without mentioning the hundreds of millions of followers of Hinduism, the religion that instituted the holiday.

Hindus on Twitter noticed the omission immediately and pointed out the major slight that the president’s careless tweet constituted.

Once the mistake was discovered, Trump’s original Tweet was deleted, but rather than reposting a corrected version fixing the omission, he simply repeated the error in the corrected tweet again.

It wasn’t just Hindus who noticed the mistake.

Finally, about 20 minutes after Trump posted the second embarrassingly misleading tweet, he posted a new tweet that properly attributed the origins of the Diwali festival.

That President Trump would have such trouble with Diwali is not surprising considering what the festival symbolizes in the Hindu tradition: the spiritual “victory of light over darkness, good over evil and knowledge over ignorance.”

Sounds like a good slogan for the forces in the resistance aligned against the president.

Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.

Original reporting by Brett Samuels at The Hill.

Vinnie Longobardo

is the Managing Editor of Washington Press and a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.