“She was off base,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “She had a pen in her hand, which Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb.”

During a Wednesday morning interview on “Fox and Friends,” Trump said Fields was carrying a pen, suggesting that pens were not allowed at the March 8 press conference in Florida where the incident occurred.

“She’s got a pen in her hand, which she’s not supposed to have,” he said. “Secret Service can tell you that.”

Trump also addressed the charges filed against Lewandowski during an interview on Fox News with Sean Hannity. A spokeswoman for the campaign on Tuesday said that Lewandowski would not be fired even if he was convicted of the battery charge.

The manliest of manly men is afraid of a female reporter with a pen? Pens are banned from his events? It should be astonishing that the Insult Comedian is dragging the Secret Service into his web of preposterous lies, but it’s not. It’s what Trump does. We’ve all known people, usually men, who *always* have to be right, and can convince themselves of *anything* to support their delusional infallibility. That’s the Insult Comedian in a wingnutshell. His shamelessly shameful handling of the Fields-Lewandowski incident is one reason that he’s going to be a LOSER in the general election according to Slate’s Jim Newell:

Trump has backed himself into a corner. He has mastered the means of securing a plurality in a Republican primary by bullying and bluster, followed by refusal to back down and portraying that refusal as much-needed strength. But taking steps to ease concerns among Republican voters who aren’t his base, much less with the general electorate, would require running a different campaign—one that might begin with, say, the firing of a campaign manager who lied about battering a female reporter and now faces criminal charges over the incident. Running a different campaign might have meant that he would have never gotten this far in the first place, but it’s what he needs to do if he wants to become president. It would probably require being a different person, perhaps one with a barely sound moral compass. We’ve seen enough to rule out the possibility of that.

I originally planned to give Tammy Wynette the last word, but since the Insult Comedian would be afraid of her potentially weaponized big hair, the Lyle Lovett version will have to do; pun intended. He *did* have big hair back in the ’80’s and ’90’s, but he’s not a femme fatale: