While it admittedly doesn’t take much to trigger mockery from Twitter users, President Trump’s claim Tuesday that he simply misspoke when he failed to defend US intelligence agencies before a hostile power struck many as hollow.
During Monday’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, Trump said he was told by US intelligence officials that Russia had meddled in the 2016 presidential election, but Putin told him Russia had no involvement.
Instead of standing alongside US intelligence, Trump said he didn’t see any reason why it would be Russia.
Trying to clean up his remarks amid the backlash that followed, Trump said Tuesday that he misspoke and meant to say “I don’t see any reason why I wouldn’t, or why it wouldn’t be Russia’’ instead of ‘‘why it would” when referencing Russia as the source of the meddling.
Twitter soon had a field day imagining what it might look like if other presidents had employed the double negative:
The jokes spurred hashtags, including #doublenegativehistoryrevisions.
The conversation bled into other areas: