It’s not clear why, but Donald Trump sees irony in traveling 19,500 miles in the next week while his legal inquisitors continue their investigation into whether his campaign colluded with Russians to swing the 2016 election.
‘Isn’t it Ironic?’ the president tweeted Thursday morning. Somewhere, fans of Canadian singer-songwriter Alanis Morissette twitched. And tweeted.
‘Getting ready to go to the G-7 in Canada to fight for our country on Trade (we have the worst trade deals ever made), then off to Singapore to meet with North Korea & the Nuclear Problem…But back home we still have the 13 Angry Democrats pushing the Witch Hunt!’
Trump’s journey will likely have its own ups and downs – squaring off against frustrated trading partners one day and a belligerent dictatorship the next – but Special Counsel Robert Mueller shows no sign of letting him off the hook.
The year-long probe has stretched to include a daunting indictment of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who faces the possibility of having his bail revoked in a matter of days over accusations of witness tampering while he awaits trial on money-laundering and conspiracy charges.
President Donald Trump called it ‘ironic’ the Special Counsel Robert Mueller is continuing his probe in Washington while he’s traveling to Canada and Singapore
The line ‘Isn’t it ironic?’ brought to mind the 1995 Alanis Morissette hit
Morissette said in her blockbuster tune: ‘It’s like rain on your wedding day / It’s a free ride when you’ve already paid / It’s the good advice that you just didn’t take’
Mueller is forging ahead with a wide-ranging probe into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an effort Trump calls a ‘Witch Hunt’
Mueller has indicted more than a dozen Russians and extracted guilty pleas from a pair of bit-players in the saga, getting them to admit lying to investigators and committing what Washington wags call ‘process crimes.’
The president is putting pressure on the special counselor, rebranding him as the leader of a gaggle of ’13 angry Democrats’ – a term he’s used 7 times on Twitter in the past two weeks.
‘Witch hunt’ has made 11 appearances in the same timeframe.
But Trump has tweeted about irony, a concept that requires a second-level, ‘meta’ understanding of events going on around him, just two other times since launching his presidential campaign in 2015.
Two weeks before Election Day in 2016, he called it ‘ironic’ that Hillary Clinton was filmed lecturing aides about cybersecurity and how to guard ‘sensitive information.’
Morisette’s ‘Ironic’ music video has been viewed more than 86 million times on YouTube
Blue-check tweeters who heard ‘Isn’t it ironic’ in their heads leapt to mock Trump
Trump’s point was clear, given his emphasis on his Democratic rival’s history of storing classified government secrets on an unsecured email server that was open to the prying eyes of the world’s intelligence services.
And two months into his presidency he blasted the House Freedom Caucus, an agglomeration of right-wing hard-liners, for scuttling an Obamacare replacement package because it wasn’t conservative enough.
‘The irony,’ he tweeted then, ‘is that the Freedom Caucus, which is very pro-life and against Planned Parenthood, allows P.P. to continue if they stop this plan!’
A White House spokesperson did not respond to a question about what Trump meant Thursday morning.
The president will be on Canada on Friday, in tense talks with other leaders about trade and global security in Charlevoix, Quebec.
However unlikely, it’s possible he was sending a subtle signal about Morissette, one of the Great White North’s more celebrated pop artists.
The Capella Hotel will be the venue for the June 12 summit between Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, on Singapore’s resort island of Sentosa
A Canadian mounted police officer walks past the Charlevoix G7 logo at the main press center, ahead of G7 Summit in Quebec, Canada
‘Isn’t it ironic,’ the singer asked in a 1995 hit, listing a collection of poetic ironies – like an old man who ‘won the lottery and died the next day,’ ‘a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break’ and ‘meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful wife.’
The song was widely panned for confusing irony with coincidence.
More than two decades later, Twitter users piled on.
Tufts University professor Daniel Drezner quoted Trump and added: ‘Like a small crowd on your Inauguration Day.’
Center for Responsive Politics researcher Robert Maguire jabbed: ‘It’s the good advice (like not hiring Flynn to be national security advisor or listening when the FBI said the Russians would try to infiltrate your campaign) that you just didn’t take.’
Others laughingly predicted a congressional impeachment because lawmakers wouldn’t be able to get the song out of their heads.
Political Twitter on Thursday morning was chock full of jokes about how Trump’s hat-tip to Alanis Morissette would come back to haunt him
The president ran into a different buzzsaw of Canadian culture critics and historians on Wednesday following a news report about a comment he made to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during a May 25 phone call.
Fuming about trade and tariffs, Trump attacked his Canadian counterpart’s nation for burning down the White House in 1814 – something British troops were responsible for.
Canada didn’t exist as a nation for more than another half-century.
Some Trump defenders insisted during the ensuing Twitter frenzy that the president was joking, saying he must have known Canadians themselves laugh about torching America’s presidential mansion since the perpetrators were based in England’s Canadian territories.
One White House official told DailyMail.com on Thursday morning that the president ‘just kinda stumbled into that.’
But was he sending a subtle wink to Trudeau by quoting a recording artist who was popular around the time he was in his mid-twenties?
‘Is he quoting Alanis Morissette? Who knows?’ a second official said. ‘But if he can bring peace to the Korean peninsula and shrink our trade deficit, then who cares?’