when a correction isn't a correction

My buddy Tom is a good fellow, but he's in the grip of Trump Derangement Syndrome. This means he often opens verbal and text conversations with something new about Trump—mostly links to articles offering utterly useless critiques of the president (e.g., "Trump gave a speech without wearing a mask!"). The usual garbage sources get cited: CNN, The Huffington Post, etc. I sigh and give Tom's links a cursory read. Occasionally, I'll react to them, but always in a low-key, detached manner. Today, Tom sent a screen shot of a tweet that he thought was witty, and I guess because it had a language-Nazi tone, he thought I'd get into it:

So I texted Tom back the following reply:

Greenfield is probably right about Trump Jr.'s not being very grammatically astute. I'd bet that the book was either ghost-written or heavily edited.

That said, the title is technically fine in the singular. English has a tradition of using the singular when people would normally use a plural. Brad Pitt's character in "Inglourious Basterds" says something like, "The German will come to fear us" instead of, "Germans will come to fear us." One of the textbooks we're working on at DYB has a reading passage about a bird: "The fulmar vomits at its attacker in self-defense," not "Fulmars vomit..." We write "Father's Day" (singular form) even though the holiday is for all fathers, etc.

Think of it this way: when you see a singular noun being used in a plural sense, add the adjective "typical" in front of it to understand the intended meaning:

● The typical German will come to fear us.
● The typical fulmar vomits at its attacker.
● (The Typical) Father's Day

And by that logic:

● The Typical Democrat's Defense of the Indefensible

If the complaint is one of clarity, then yeah, maybe putting the apostrophe in the plural position might've eliminated nitpicks like Greenfield's. But from a proofreader's perspective, Greenfield's snarky tweet is an unnecessary "correction," which makes him look foolish. Surely there are more substantive things to criticize than Republicans' inability to write. (And I'd agree that GOP pols often seem consistently unable to string words together in a mistake-free way. This goes back at least as far as Reagan, whose personal letters show he was English-challenged.)

Tom wrote back: "That is one hell of an explanation!" Cryptically, he added, "Too many exceptions, methinks." I'm not sure what he means by that, but Tom often writes in a way that only he understands. Heh.

As for Greenfield's non-correction... I feel the same irritation that I feel when a commenter "corrects" me when I'm not wrong. This time, though, there's that political dimension: Tom thought another blow had been struck against the Trumps, but no: Jeff Greenfield only succeeded in beclowning himself.

(NB: Greenfield's incorrect "it's tree" is doubtless a deliberate mockery of Trump Jr.'s supposed gaffe; I'm pretty sure that Greenfield is smart enough to know the difference between "its" and "it's." That said, Greenfield's deliberate error is more a matter of diction [word choice] than of grammar, so he might still be guilty of a dumb mistake here.)