Donald Trump goes haywire

| 12:12 pm EDT August 15, 2018
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There comes a point where even the most creative con artist ends up snowing himself. Donald Trump has been running from his criminal scandals from the day he took office, falling back on increasingly absurd and histrionic antics in the hope of fending off the inevitable just a little bit longer. The trouble for Trump is that he’s run out of material, to the point that he’s becoming a thread-worn parody of himself.

We all knew exactly what Donald Trump was doing when he first began referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as a “witch hunt.” It didn’t matter that his detractors knew he was lying, or that his supporters were thrilled that he was lying. It only mattered that it left the average person sitting at home confused. If all these various people say he’s a Russian traitor, but he says it’s a witch hunt, let’s just wait and see where this goes, they’ve been saying to themselves.

But then Trump’s people started getting arrested and started cutting plea deals against him, and clearly this wasn’t some witch hunt. So then Trump decided that he had to fall back on the idea that not only was the investigation meritless, it was also being stacked against him. That’s when he started calling it a “rigged witch hunt.” Those words don’t really go together, but that doesn’t matter. This was all about continuing to muddy the waters, though in less effective fashion, because at some point his version of things starts to sound ridiculous even to those who don’t know the facts.

Now Donald Trump is reduced to referring to the Trump-Russia investigation as an “illegal rigged witch hunt.” This concept requires swallowing the idea that the investigation is meritless, and it’s being rigged against him, and it’s somehow illegal for Trump to be investigated to begin with. It’s laugh out loud nonsense on its face. Again, it doesn’t matter one bit that his base still wants to pretend its true. It only matters to the people in the middle sitting at home, because they’re the ones who were always going to decide Trump’s fate. And “illegal rigged witch hunt” is the point at which they start rolling their eyes.