During the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign, President Obama startled some people by asserting “If you’ve got a business – you didn’t build that”. This paper claims, from a relevance-theoretic viewpoint, that both possible interpretations derive from diverging contextual suppositions on the side of the audience. Different contextual suppositions engender a different cognitive impact when the utterance allows for more than one interpretation. Joint with a very polarized U.S. political scene, where participants throw themselves at every possible opponent’s miscue, all the elements for misunderstanding are present.