Jussie Smollett, the TV actor who almost got away with blaming President Trump’s supporters for a late-night beating that temporarily boosted his career before Chicago police blew the whistle on it, is back in legal trouble, indicted for lying to authorities about the February 2019 hoax.

The case again raised the question of what the Empire star was thinking in staging the attack and blaming Trump.

Now, thanks to a new book that documents dozens of cases of “privileged victims” who’ve made similar, and false, claims of Trump disciples targeting, bullying, and attacking them, we have an answer: Blaming Trump is the template to success.

“He took a short cut to the top using the social justice formula for the oppressed: virtuous minority + attack by bigoted whites (Trump supporters) = $$$,” wrote Eddie Scarry in his latest book, Privileged Victims, being released later this month.

Scarry, a Washington Examiner politics and culture writer, added: “Smollett’s story isn’t even original or in any way different from nearly dozens of claims made before his. White Trump supporters committing crimes against minorities is a fairy tale told time and time again.”

His book, out this month and published by Bombardier, richly details how some have seized on social justice for “victims” and how the Trump era and the charges on the Left that he and his supporters are evil have supercharged the trend.

“Where there is Trump, so too must there be victims,” wrote Scarry, detailing several examples of mostly minorities making up claims of attacks from Trump supporters in an attempt to gain celebrity, money, or advancement before revealing them as fake news.

Complete and total TDS meltdown.https://t.co/zbUxs1x4ML — LawEnforcementToday (@LawEnforceToday) February 13, 2020

Scarry, whose prior work, Fraud and Fiction, debunked the falsehoods in the anti-Trump book Fire and Fury, blamed the left-leaning media for fostering the victim climate.

“The fictions, falsehoods, and fabrications about politically driven hate crimes continue uninterrupted and with great assist from the news media,” he wrote.

Coincidentally, as I wrote about Scarry’s book, the Washington Post published a report blaming Trump for a rise in bullying in schools. The story used examples nearly identical to the “Trump-related hate crimes” Scarry cited in more than 289 pages of Privileged Victims.

In one of his examples, Scarry cited a report days after Trump’s 2016 election in which somebody hung a whiteboard in the hall of an Elon University dorm that read, “Bye Bye Latinos Hasta La Vista,” apparently a reference to Trump’s promised crackdown on illegal border crossings.

Shortly after the North Carolina campus went into an understandable uproar, campus authorities discovered that it was a hoax perpetrated by a Latino.

In a line that provides a theme for many of his examples of people using the anti-Trump template to stir things up, Scarry wrote: “With Trump-related hate crimes, the formula is always the same. “‘Hasta la vista’ becomes ‘El engaño era bueno’: The scam was good.”