Two weeks ago, Donald Trump tweeted that Barack Obama “had my ‘wires tapped’ in Trump Tower.” He has yet to produce evidence supporting the allegation, and last week, his press secretary, Sean Spicer, retreated from the claim by referring to “wiretapping” in air quotes. Because the mention of wiretapping in the tweet (in reality, just one of the mentions in a series of tweets) fell between quotation marks, he argued, it could mean many things, not necessarily a literal wiretapping.
Soon after, President Trump echoed this point on Tucker Carlson’s show: “Nobody ever talks about the fact that it was in quotes, but that’s a very important thing.”
And just like that, President Trump co-opted irony.
I’ve been mildly obsessed with air quotes and their cousin, scare quotes, for years. They are typically used when a term appears in quotation marks for reasons other than being a direct quotation, as when many newspapers first wrote about the “alt-right.” As The Atlantic’s Megan Garber notes, they indicate “epistemic uncertainty.” Ms. Garber added, “They take common ground and suggest that it might, but only just ‘might,’ be made of quicksand.”
Read the article at the NY Times
