Want to sneak out bad news? Make it a boring, grammatical mess.

“If you want to do something evil,” John Oliver once said on HBO’s Last Week Tonight, “put it inside something boring.”

What could be more boring than bad grammar?

He continued: “Apple could put the entire text of Mein Kampf inside the iTunes User Agreement, and you’d just go, ‘Agree.’”

Donald Trump’s communications team must have been paying attention (to Oliver, that is; hopefully not Mein Kampf, but we’ve always got questions).

Recently, the New York Times dropped the bombshell that Trump’s fundraising apparatus had increased tenfold the percentage of each donation that’s diverted to pay his legal fees, rather than to his campaign.

Sounds like something his campaign would want to respond forcefully to, right? His spokesperson Steven Cheung had only a written statement that said: “Because the campaign wants to ensure every dollar donated to President Trump is spent in the most cost-effective manner, a fair-market analysis was conducted to determine email list rentals would be more efficient by amending the fund-raising split between the two entities.”

Bless you if you managed to stay awake through that 42-word statement. I got bored just copying and pasting it. It’s a grammatical mess — abstruse legalese that any casual reader is bound to get lost in.

Which is exactly the point.

Cheung, who wrote it down to make sure he got it right, knows exactly what he’s doing. It’s worth unpacking why the grammar is so bad, and what that means for our understanding of what the campaign did.

It’s worth unpacking why the grammar is so bad.

To be clear, nothing about the sentence’s grammar is technically incorrect; nobody dangled a modifier or spliced a comma. But you don’t have to be wrong to be bad.

The whole mess starts with a hulking adverb clause that takes up half the sentence, from “Because” to “manner.” That means you’re literally halfway through the quote before you reach a subject, which is the thing that gives you some idea of what the hell we’re talking about. Good writing gets to the point quickly; this does not.

Then there’s the passive voice: “was conducted.” I’ve written many times about why passive voice is dangerous, as it eschews responsibility by not naming actors. In this case, who did the fair-market analysis? We don’t know if Cheung was trying to hide who did it, but we do know that eschewing responsibility is kind of Trump’s thing.

» READ MORE: With a second indictment, the wheels of justice continue their steady advance on Trump | Editorial

Strunk and White’s Elements of Style — to choose one august writing guide — has any number of other suggestions for clear, effective writing that Cheung blows off. Where Strunk and White advise to “save [auxiliary verbs] for situations involving real uncertainty,” Cheung says “rentals would be more efficient” (instead of just “are”). Where they suggest avoiding “fancy words,” Cheung chooses “amending” rather than, say, “changing.” And where they coach concision, Cheung employs phrases like “in the most cost-effective manner” instead of a single word, like “prudently,” that could do the same job.

The resulting sentence isn’t stilted because Cheung is a bad writer. To the contrary, it takes a good writer to construct a response meant to make the Trump team’s actions sound boring and therefore not worth paying attention to — when paying attention is exactly what those sending him money should be doing.

Usually, the strongest statement is the one that’s clear and direct, not clunky and academic. Dig in to see what they’re hiding, and that’s when things get really interesting.

The Grammarian, otherwise known as Jeffrey Barg, looks at how language, grammar, and punctuation shape our world, and appears biweekly. Send comments, questions, and zero conditionals to jeff@theangrygrammarian.com.