It was surely the first time in history that a president’s credibility had hung from a pair of punctuation marks. Last week, in his efforts to extenuate President Trump’s tweeted claims that President Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower,” press secretary Sean Spicer came up with a novel and ingenious explanation. “The president was very clear in his tweet that it was, you know, ‘wiretapping,’” Spicer said, flipping up air quotes around the word. “That spans a whole host of surveillance types of options.”



On one level, this was just another of the unending efforts by Trump’s apologists to explain away, one after another, his falsehoods and fabulations as linguistic or rhetorical maneuvers. He didn’t mean it literally, they say; he was being ironic, or joking. At other times, he just was being refreshingly folksy, punctuating the way regular people do. Or in this case, as Spicer tells it, he was deftly using quotation marks to expand the meaning of a word.

Linguistically, of course, that’s nonsense, though it didn’t stop Trump from seizing on Spicer’s interpretation in subsequent days. (“Nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes,” the president told Tucker Carlson, “but that’s a very important thing.”) But over and above what the quotation marks didn’t mean, it’s worth asking why Trump used them in the first place. Because the answer to that question offers an insight into Trump’s abiding insecurity about his profound illiteracy.

Why did Trump put quotation marks around “wire tapped”? Most people took him as using scare quotes, which is what Spicer signaled when he accompanied the expression with air quotes, their gestural equivalent. Scare quotes are the ones we deploy when we want to use a word without signing on for all the associations attached to it, as in “Voters are resentful of ‘elites.’” The device goes back to the nineteenth century; Henry James was besotted with it. But both the term “scare quotes” and the parallel gesture are recent inventions that reflect the modern vogue for the device, which has spilled over from literature to everyday use.

Scare quotes have become something of a modern plague, saturating whole quarters of modern discourse with cynicism, insinuation, and sarcasm. So it isn’t surprising that people would take Trump’s quotation marks as just another instance of the phenomenon. The Guardian said that Trump had used scare quotes to distance himself from the words. In The New York Times, Moises Velasquez-Manoff wrote that Trump’s use of scare quotes had “turned an invention of the urbane and educated against them. He has weaponized irony.”