Nancy Pelosi 'Trolls' Trump By Defining 'Exculpatory' During Briefing: 'Mr. President, That Means...'

Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi felt compelled to define exculpatory for President Donald Trump during a briefing on Capitol Hill, a move that some on social media described as "trolling."

Pelosi's remarks came on the second day of the impeachment hearings against Trump, who some allege should be impeached because they believe his request of the Ukrainian president to investigate former vice president and Biden's son, Hunter, was tantamount to asking a foreign government to interfere in an American election. Pelosi, along with House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff, spearheaded the launch of the impeachment inquiry late last month. The hearing began yesterday with the testimonies of William Taylor, the top United States's top diplomat in Ukraine, and George Kent, a senior State Department official in charge of Ukraine policy.

In the briefing on Thursday, Pelosi said that if the president had any evidence that indicated he should not be impeached, then it was in his best interest to bring it forward.

"If the president has something that is exculpatory—Mr. President, that means you have anything that shows your innocence—then he should make that known," Pelosi said.

The Mother Jones Twitter account described Pelosi's explanatory aside as "throwing shade."

Brian Klaas, a professor of global politics at University College London, said Pelosi's definition of the word for Trump was like a "chef's kiss."

Trump is no stranger to congratulating himself on his own intelligence.

Last month, in response to critics who said Turkey might persecute the ethnic Kurdish minority in Syria after he decided to pull American troops from the country, the president tweeted, "[I]f Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)."

However, Newsweek has previously reported on an analysis of the president's vocabulary that indicated that he communicated publicly at the same level as a 10-year-old, the "lowest grade level" of every president since the Great Depression.

That analysis was conducted by Factbase in response to a tweet Trump wrote in which he lauded his accomplishments, stating that he won the presidential election "on [his] first try" and believed he "would qualify as not smart, but genius...and a very stable genius at that!"

"By every metric and methodology tested, Donald Trump's vocabulary and grammatical structure is significantly more simple, and less diverse, than any President since Herbert Hoover, when measuring 'off-script' words, that is, words far less likely to have been written in advance for the speaker," Factbase CEO Bill Frischling wrote, as previously reported by Newsweek. "The gap between Trump and the next closest president…is larger than any other gap using Flesch-Kincaid. Statistically speaking, there is a significant gap."