WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Donald J. Trump attempted to further distance himself from a racist chant shouted at a North Carolina campaign rally earlier this week by denying that he had attended the rally.

“I wasn’t there,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Friday. “If I had been there, you can be sure I would have done everything I could to stop them from chanting.”

Trump said that he was furious that thousands of people had apparently assembled in North Carolina to chant racist things when he was nowhere near the rally and thus totally incapable of intervening.

“It’s the kind of thing I would have been disgusted by if I had been there to hear it,” he said. “Unfortunately, I wasn’t there.”

On Capitol Hill, Senator Lindsey Graham lashed out at reporters for persistently claiming that Trump had, in fact, attended the rally. “If he says he wasn’t there, then, damn it, he wasn’t there,” a visibly furious Graham said. “How do you people sleep at night?”