Prince of Whales

2019photoshop memeclassic

Published September 23, 2026

Prince of Whales is a typo Donald Trump made on June 13, 2019 when tweeting about the British Prince of Wales, sparking a wave of Twitter photoshops that placed crowned whales beside the president. The blunder pulled tens of thousands of retweets within a day and turned a homophone slip into one of the more memorable Trump-era spelling memes.

misspelling memestrump memesphotoshop memespolitical satire memespun memes

Overview

Prince of Whales is what Twitter got when Donald Trump swapped a homophone into a tweet about visiting British royalty, and users immediately took the misspelling literally1. The joke works on one clean substitution, so the format is almost entirely visual: Trump standing beside a whale in a crown, a whale wearing a suit at a G20 lineup, or the president shaking a flipper on a red carpet.

The photoshops lean on the same gag every time, which is part of why the meme stuck. Dictionary references, marine biology puns, and 'the royal cetacean' captions filled out the reply chains, and the tweet itself was eventually edited by Trump to fix the spelling, which only gave the screenshots a second life2. As a political spelling meme it sits alongside 'covfefe' in the running list of Trump-typo jokes that Twitter turned into image content within hours.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter
Date
2019

On June 13, 2019, Donald Trump posted a tweet listing the foreign leaders he claimed to speak with regularly, writing that he had 'just met with the Queen of England (U.K.), the Prince of Whales, the P.M. of the United Kingdom, the P.M. of Ireland, the President of France and the President of Poland'1. The tweet pulled more than 96,100 likes and 20,200 retweets in its first day before Trump edited the post to correct the spelling to 'Wales'1.

The subject was Prince Charles, then heir apparent and the sitting Prince of Wales, whom Trump had met during a state visit to the United Kingdom earlier that month2. The typo, not the diplomatic meeting, is what carried the tweet across timelines.

How It Spread

Reaction started within hours of the tweet going live. Dictionary.com replied on the same day, June 13, 2019, with the pointed clarification that 'Wales is a division of the United Kingdom. Whales are not,' pulling roughly 530 likes and 120 retweets of its own1. That reply set the template for the wordplay wing of the meme, and other accounts piled in with marine puns and definition screenshots.

The photoshop wing of the meme kicked off after Trump quietly edited the original tweet. Twitter user @miainbatcountry responded with an image of Trump standing next to a whale wearing a crown, captioned '#NeverForget,' which pulled around 760 likes and 80 retweets in a day1. Similar edits followed, showing whales in royal regalia beside the president, and news outlets covering the tweet used the photoshops as illustration2.

The meme did not build a long tail of new formats after June 2019, but it still gets pulled out any time Trump-era typos are ranked next to 'covfefe' or any time a public figure confuses Wales with whales in print. Urban Dictionary entries for the phrase were also filed around this window, catching earlier unrelated slang uses of 'prince of whales' as flavor rather than as a driver of the meme3.

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