Donald Trump: "Who should I fire? Should I fire Maria?"
Cyndi Lauper: "I can't..."
Donald Trump: "Why don't you just say Maria?"
Cyndi Lauper: "Because I feel bad. She's happy now..."
Donald Trump: "Badly. You feel badly."
Cyndi Lauper: "Badly."
— Donald Trump & Cyndi Lauper, The Apprentice (television show), season 9, episode 7
About the Word:
Donald Trump is hardly the first person (or even the first politician) to have difficulty in telling the difference between when one should use bad and badly in describing how one feels. He is, however, probably the first presidential candidate who has made the regrettable decision to correct someone who was actually using the correct form, and while on national television.
In the 9th season of the show, Trump took the opportunity to 'correct' Cyndi Lauper's use of bad (when describing how she felt) to badly. However, it is entirely correct to say 'I feel bad.' The reason that Trump fell victim to this common hypercorrection is that feel is a verb, and many people learned that the word following a verb should be an adverb (badly), rather than an adjective (bad).
But feel belongs to a class of words referred to as linking (or 'copulative') verbs, which can be followed by an adjective. This is why James Brown sang 'I feel good,' rather than 'I feel well,' or 'I feel goodly.'
Definition:
: in a bad manner
: to a great or intense degree
Photo credit: Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 3.0) on Wikimedia
