Trump and his team are shocked that people actually believed all those insane campaign promises

During what seems like an exceedingly awkward, ill-timed event at Harvard last night, Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump‘s former campaign manager, dropped a revealing tidbit, accusing the media of failing in their coverage because they took Trump’s proposals “literally.”

“This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” Lewandowski said, as quoted by the Washington Post. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”

The line nearly got lost in the fray–with tensions running high between gloating Trump aides and still-reeling Hillary Clinton staffers–but it echoed a bizarre riff Trump himself used on Thursday during the first stop on his victory tour at a Carrier plant in Indianapolis.

While explaining why he felt compelled to give the manufacturer a sweetheart deal to keep close to 1,000 jobs in the state in exchange for a $7 million tax cut, Trump told the crowd that he was shocked, just shocked, that people whose livelihoods hung in the balance didn’t read his job-saving promise as the “euphemism” it was.

Trump also said he basically forgot about the promise to Carrier workers until he saw his own remarks replayed on the evening news:

I’m saying to myself, man. And then they played my statement, and I said, “Carrier will never leave.” But that was a euphemism. I was talking about Carrier like all other companies from here on in because they made the decision a year and a half ago. But he believed that that was—and I could understand it; I actually said [it]—when they played that I said I did make it but I didn’t mean it quite that way.

Maybe on the next stop of his victory tour, our president-elect will reveal that his proposal to ban all Muslims from entering the country was just a practical joke all along.