“In a key sentence in my remarks I said the word ‘would’ instead of ‘wouldn’t’…the sentence should have been, ‘I don’t any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double-negative.”

—President Donald Trump

It washes. The explanation. It’s a mistake any of us could make, especially in Helsinki,  after holding a palaver with a man whose name hasn’t been frequently omitted in conversations about tyrants and despots who have had people murdered over even a mild disagreement.

Add to that bit of discomfort, the unforgiving lights of the international film crews and the aggressive interrogation by the press, already well known for being the enemy of the American people.

I believe him: The man hasn’t been born who hasn’t confused opposites from time to time — who’s said “yes,” when clearly he meant “no,” or who’s misunderstood the subtle nuances between “up” and “down” or in the instance of the matter at hand, “would” and “wouldn’t.”

The stress of the moment must have been monumental, and so one can sympathize with the speaker for not recognizing the importance of the contraction “wouldn’t.” Perhaps if the speaker knew that the contraction means “would not,” he would, or, more accurately, wouldn’t, have been misunderstood so readily.

Few of us are comfortable with public speaking. Take that fear and throw in being faced with the specter of assassination by a former KGB lieutenant colonel. That’s more than enough; it’s easier than you could imagine to get all tangled up in double-negatives. It’s frankly amazing that he didn’t find himself getting bogged down in triple- and quadruple negatives, or that he could even get the subject to agree with the verb (although it’s unclear that he did).

Further, obviously feeling trapped like an animal by the surprising ambush of a gotcha question by a no-doubt sadly failing journalist, the speaker could hardly be blamed for stating he believed the Russian leader when the Russian leader said Russians didn’t interfere with voting. Besides the fact that the Russian leader’s opponents have a way of, shall we say, “leaving politics,” your American leader, who has already acknowledged that he is smarter than virtually everyone—a “very stable genius”—understandably assumed that a Russian leader probably knows better than any American intelligence agency whether his own people have been involved with Russian meddling.

Nervousness, too, easily explains why the speaker fell back on the subject of his opponent in the presidential election (who, incidentally, he beat; Google it) and her mysteriously disappearing emails. It didn’t answer the question, but it was a familiar theme and it helped him obtain some equilibrium, enough to carry him through the interview and leave the press conference with a sense of joy and triumph, only to find out later that most of America and the world was pretty repulsed by the Helsinki conference in which he expressed his preference and admiration for the Russian leader over American fact-gathering institutions.

The enemy of the American people was declaring him the enemy of the American people, a fact that bears some resemblance to a double-negative.

I, however, believe his explanation. And by that, I mean I don’t.