Wednesday, July 18, 2018

Double Negative

Washington Post:

At the Helsinki news conference, during a disjointed soliloquy about a Democratic National Committee computer server, Trump referred to Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and the findings of Russian interference in the election: “With that being said, all I can do is ask the question. My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.”

Then at the White House on Tuesday, Trump asserted that he had misspoken by saying “would” instead of “wouldn’t.”

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative,” Trump told reporters.

I wouldn’t not say that the man is a treasonous liar.

If you watch the video of him giving this explanation, he has all the body language of a kid being forced to apologize for doing something rotten that he clearly intended to do.  And clearly his handlers or somebody tried to get him to walk the whole thing back but the best that they could get out of him was that he bungled his syntax and used a double negative.  And he clearly has no idea what a double negative is.  As one commentator noted, he speaks English like it’s his second language taught to him by someone who learned English last week.

Trump’s biggest regret from the whole thing will turn out to be that he had to make this statement.  He meant what he originally said, and even with this new non-apology explanation he’s couching it with winks and nudges.  In his mind, the press conference didn’t make him look weak, but this forced statement does, and he’s only doing it so it’s on the record when he’s on trial in the Senate.

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