Trump can't even whine about Paul Manafort going to jail without lying

Now that he’s home from his photo op with North Korean dictator and new Trump BFF Kim Jong Un, the tweeter in chief has a lot of whining to catch up on.

After news broke that former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort is heading to jail, Trump took to Twitter to complain about it, despite his insistence mere hours earlier that Manafort had “nothing to do with” his campaign.

“Wow, what a tough sentence for Paul Manafort, who has represented Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole and many other top political people and campaigns,” Trump tweeted. “Didn’t know Manafort was the head of the Mob. What about Comey and Crooked Hillary and all of the others? Very unfair!”

Manafort was not sentenced. He hasn’t actually been convicted — yet. Instead, Manafort managed to so thoroughly piss off the judge who had graciously granted him bail when he was first indicted last fall that the judge revoked his bail.

So Manafort is headed to jail while he awaits trial for his long and growing list of alleged crimes, that include conspiracy, money laundering, false statements, failure to disclose foreign assets, tax and bank fraud, and obstruction of justice by way of witness tampering.

He can’t even complain about Manafort’s latest legal misfortune without lying.

Maybe he doesn’t know Manafort hasn’t actually been sentenced. But since he has nothing on his public schedule for Friday, and has found plenty of time to rage-tweet about what he’s watching on TV, it seems unlikely that in all of his viewing he somehow missed why Manafort is going to jail.

Not that the details matter. Trump doesn’t care. He has spent the better part of his Friday telling one lie after another. His entire bizarre performance before the press was, as Rep. Eric Swawell (D-CA), called it, “45 minutes of scamapalooza.”

Trump lied about everything, from how long Manafort worked for him, to a new report that he claimed exonerates him. (It does no such thing.)

Now Trump is making up stories about why his indicted former campaign manager is going to jail. And he’s complaining about how unfair it is that a man who literally cannot stop breaking the law while awaiting trial for breaking the law should be kept off the streets to stop him from breaking more laws.

Remember, this is a supposedly “tough on crime” president. But the only people he wants to see jailed are the ones who, unlike Manafort, haven’t been charged with any crimes.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.