Welcome to Donald Trump’s post-Mueller twilight zone

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Robert Mueller has submitted his report about Donald Trump, but we know hardly anything about what’s in it. There’s only one person who knows even less than we do about what’s in the report: Donald Trump. He only gets his news from the worst of TV pundits, who tell him what he wants to hear. His own people try to shield him from real news, for fear he’ll implode. So not only does he not know what’s in the report, he doesn’t know about half of what’s transpired in the Mueller probe in plain sight up to this point.

For instance, Robert Mueller gave a free pass to Donald Trump’s former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn despite his serious crimes, and then Mueller redacted nearly all of Flynn’s obviously crucial cooperation. It’s fairly easy for us to parse that the redacted stuff is about Trump or other fish bigger than Flynn, and that the “stuff” in question is surely in Mueller’s report. But does Trump even know that any of the above happened? I can’t recall if any of Trump’s favorite Fox News hosts bothered to cover any of it.

There are numerous other examples of this kind of thing. Trump’s former campaign vice chairman Rick Gates was still cooperating as recently as last week, which means he’s sold out people bigger than his longtime partner in crime Paul Manafort. What did Gates give up on Trump? For that matter, what did the likes of Don McGahn and Steve Bannon give up about Trump during their reported tens of hours of testimony? What all did Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg give up in exchange for his immunity? We don’t know the answers to these questions, but we do know the answer isn’t “nothing.”

So if Donald Trump is feeling good right about now, it’s based on a false sense of security emanating from his own blissful ignorance about everything that’s been happening in plain sight. On some level we’ve all been in the Twilight Zone since the day Trump was named the winner of the election. But now Trump in particular is in a Twilight Zone of his own making, because he doesn’t even know what all he doesn’t know.