HELTER SKELTER

Marianne Williamson Falls for Satirical Article Claiming Trump Pardoned Charles Manson

The White House candidate posted the hot take that it was “deeply sinister” for Trump to posthumously pardon Manson—but, obviously, he hasn’t.

Nothing good can come of tweeting at 12:53 a.m.—and Marianne Williamson has found that out the hard way. The Democratic presidential candidate appeared to fall for a joke news article early Monday when she claimed that President Trump had pardoned the dead cult leader Charles Manson. “There is something deeply sinister about Trump pardoning Charles Manson, even posthumously. Dog whistles of the very worst possible kind,” she tweeted in the early hours. Of course, Trump hasn’t issued a pardon for the swastika-emblazoned cult leader whose followers carried out a series of nine murders. The Washington Post reports that a satirical article on the supposed pardon was recently republished by liberal blog site Daily Kos. Williamson appears to have stumbled across it and taken it at face value. She later apologized for the mistake and said that she was “glad to have been wrong,” but then deleted both the original tweet and the apology.