Very Legal and Very Cool

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Part of a series on Russiagate. [View Related Entries]

About

Very Legal and Very Cool refers to a series of jokes and memes about a tweet from United States President Donald Trump. In the tweet, he defends his business dealings during his presidential campaign as "very legal & very cool."

Origin

On November 29th, 2018, President Trump's former attorney, Michael Cohen, pleaded guilty to lying to congress regarding Trump's business dealings with Russia.^[1]

The following day, Trump tweeted, ^[2]^[3] "Oh, I get it! I am a very good developer, happily living my life, when I see our Country going in the wrong direction (to put it mildly). Against all odds, I decide to run for President & continue to run my business-very legal & very cool, talked about it on the campaign trail[…]Lightly looked at doing a building somewhere in Russia. Put up zero money, zero guarantees and didn’t do the project. Witch Hunt!" The initial tweet received more than 20,000 retweets and 94,000 likes in 24 hours (shown below).

Spread

Following the tweet, political science writer Brian Klaas tweeted,^[4] "Here’s the President of the United States saying it was 'very legal and very cool' to covertly be developing a business venture with one of America’s foremost geopolitical adversaries while that adversary was using information warfare to attack American democracy to help him win." The tweet received more than 1,100 retweets and 2,800 likes in 24 hours.

Over the next few hours, people on Twitter began mocking the phrase, indicating that the president may have been underplaying the situation (examples below).

Several media outlets covered the tweet, including NBC,^[5] The Washington Post,^[6] The Daily Dot ^[7] and more.