Hidden message attacking Obama removed from code on Trump's website

news.com.au

2 Jan, 2018 01:43 AM2 mins to read

US President Donald Trump waves as he arrives to board Air Force One. Photo / AP

It's tough to think of what would drive somebody to trawl through the JavaScript code of Trump's campaign website hoping to discover something sinister.

Yet, it appears somebody has done just that. While questionable in its own right, the more surprising aspect was what they actually uncovered.

Washington Post data reporter Christopher Ingraham recently discovered Trump's campaign website had a secret message that would be served up in the event of an internal server error.

"Oops! Something went wrong. Unlike Obama, we are working to fix the problem … and not on the golf course," the coded data read.

The website of Donald Trump, who has spent several days in a row at the golf course, is coded to serve up the following message in the event of an internal server error: https://t.co/zrWpyMXRcz pic.twitter.com/wiQSQNNzw0
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 28, 2017

The dig was designed to replace a basic "page not found" message, but it's unclear whether the error message was ever shown.

Shortly after being made public, the snippet of code was removed from the website — it can still be seen if you access an archive.org cache of the site.

UPDATE: The golf error message has been removed from the Trump and GOP websites. They also fixed the javascript "=" vs "==" problem. Still not clear when these messages would actually display, since the actual 404 (and presumably 500) page displays a different message pic.twitter.com/Z7dmyQ5smy
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) December 29, 2017

The quip was directed at the fact President Barack Obama played 333 games of golf — or once about every nine days — during his time in office.

@BarackObama played golf yesterday. Now he heads to a 10 day vacation in Martha's Vineyard. Nice work ethic.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 15, 2011

While this might seem excessive, data from The Washington Post has found President Trump golfed on at least 73 during his first 346 days in office. That's once about every five days to date.