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Politics and Government News
Bill Chappell, NPR

Actually, Trump was NOT wearing his pants backward at a weekend rally

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Former President Trump's curiously wrinkled trousers appears to have overshadowed his speech Saturday at a Republican Party state convention in North Carolina.
Former President Trump's curiously wrinkled trousers overshadowed his speech at a Republican Party convention in North Carolina.
Melissa Sue Gerrits | Getty Images

Former President Donald Trump transfixed a sizeable part of the nation over the weekend — not through his words, as he has often done, but because of his pants. Or more specifically, because of unusual wrinkles in Trump's pants that people struggled to explain.

The focus on Trump's attire overshadowed his speech at the North Carolina Republican Party's state convention Saturday night, as people weighed an unlikely question: Could the former leader of the free world be wearing his suit pants backward?

"No, Trump Did Not Wear His Pants Backwards," Snopes declared on Sunday, after reviewing 90 minutes of footage from the event.

Staff at the fact-checking site also acknowledged what many of us might be thinking: that there is surely a better use of time. They added in a tweet, "But we check what people us ask, so...."

Snopes' finding has taken only a bit of air out of the frothy speculation over Trump's curiously wrinkled trousers.

Public theorists — too many to count here — aired the possibility that Trump had some sort of accident that made the front of his pants unpresentable. The former president's critics suggested he might have simply been unaware that he put his pants on the wrong way 'round.

Others went to the archives, noting that in 2017, two members of Trump's inner circle, former White House communications director Hope Hicks and former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, reportedly used a steamer to take wrinkles out of Trump's pants — while he was wearing them.

For the record, Snopes notes that wire agency photos of Trump on the stage in Greenville, N.C., "clearly show the former president on stage wearing pants with a zipper in the front."

But with social media and the internet still buzzing about the sight, only one thing is certain: Trump's pants, it turns out, have legs.

If anyone is wondering how uncomfortable it might be to wear your pants backwards, Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly of the rap group Kris Kross, has said that for him, the group's trademark reversal wasn't even noticeable.

"Everybody always ask me that," Kelly said in 2013. "But you have to understand I've been wearing my pants backwards for 21 years."

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.