Donald Trump didn’t stay off of Twitter the morning after the bombshell report that he’d ordered Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, to lie to Congress about efforts to build a Trump Tower Moscow. But while Trump was tweeting away, he didn’t have anything to say—yet—about that report. No, his morning was spent on still more immigration fearmongering.
Trump’s tweets hit on “another big Caravan” and blaming Democrats for the shutdown he previously said he would be “proud” to own. But his opening shot was the best:
Oh my. This is a recurring far-right fantasy, that not only are scary Muslims coming into the U.S. by walking through the desert across the southern border, but that they are careless enough to lose the prayer rugs they’ve carried for, presumably, hundreds if not thousands of miles, dropping them right where they can be found by fearful anti-immigrant ranchers. One such claim, in 2014, turned out to be a soccer jersey, strongly suggesting that all these “prayer rugs” being found on the border are just random pieces of cloth getting labeled as prayer rugs by the kind of bigots who probably call the police on their own shadows (which are, after all, black).
And Donald Trump is sitting over there in the White House giving credence to this nonsense. What’s it going to be this time? Another sports jersey? A beach towel? And seriously, how could it be a surprise to find out that some people from predominantly Muslim countries have at some point crossed the southern border when Trump never shuts up about it? The man goes around yelling “thing happens thing happens thing happens”—usually using false information, by the way—and then he’s all “it would be a big surprise to you that thing happens.”
You know Trump’s got to be stewing about the report that he told Cohen to lie to Congress because to tell the truth would have gotten him in trouble. So the question is, when does he stop trying to change the subject by scaring the easily scared about scary immigrants and start the anti-Mueller rant that has to be building up inside him?