Here comes Donald Trump’s demented meltdown about Paul Manafort
Paul Manafort learned on Monday night just how screwed he is in Donald Trump’s Russia scandal. Based on the lack of reaction from Trump himself, and the manner in which he’s so thoroughly isolated from real news sources, it’s entirely possible that Trump didn’t learn about it on Monday, and that he still didn’t know about it by the time of his UN debacle on Tuesday. But Trump knows now – and here comes the inevitable meltdown.
Here’s how we know that Trump now knows what’s going on: Manafort’s attorney released a whacked out statement on Tuesday night, which read like something Trump might have written, except all the words were spelled correctly (link). The short of it is that Manafort’s lawyer is falsely accusing President Obama of having wiretapped him for political purposes. Sound familiar? It’s Trumpian in nature, and that’s not a coincidence.
What happened here is that Paul Manafort and his attorney just handed Donald Trump his script for how to react to the wiretap news. When Trump rolls out of bed and starts tweeting this morning (or tomorrow morning if he gets distracted by a butterfly in the meantime), his rhetoric will echo the sentiment in Manafort’s statement. He’ll just do it more crassly. He’ll revert back to his earlier false claim that President Obama wiretapped Trump Tower. And hey, why not? Manafort’s attorney just made the laugh out loud false assertion that Obama had something to do with the Manafort wiretap, when any first year law student knows warrants are signed off on by judges, not by the president. So if we’re going off the deep end, let’s go deep.
As per usual, Trump’s dual goal with his Twitter meltdown will be to blow off sadistic steam, while also forcing headline writers to give as much attention to the inappropriateness of his response as they do to the actual criminal revelations involved. Here comes his meltdown about Manafort. Brace yourselves. Contribute to Palmer Report
