This week, Huma Abedin, one of Hillary Clinton’s most trusted confidantes, finally dumped her husband Anthony Weiner, who was caught, once again, sending louche photos of himself to a random woman on the internet. Though Weiner could not be said to have any real ties to the Clinton campaign, his banishment from even the outer reaches of Clintonworld can be considered nothing less than a net positive for Clinton. But in the eyes Donald Trump, the scandal presents an opportunity to vilify a favored scapegoat.

Trump finds Abedin to be irresistible. She’s everything he could want in a target for his brand of paranoid mud-throwing. In addition to being a longtime aide of Clinton and the wife of Weiner, she’s a Muslim-American whose parents are from Pakistan. To most people, the only embarrassing fact here is the marriage to Weiner, which should properly excite pity rather than derision. But for Trump and his campaign, Abedin’s background and closeness to Clinton make her an ideal figure to cast in lurid tales about terrorist sleeper cells and lesbian intrigue.

The fact that the stories about Abedin, taken as a whole, are wildly contradictory hardly matters. She’s meant to play the part of the villain, so gets accused of everything Trump’s camp considers disturbing and/or titillating: passing on national security secrets to her perverted husband, carrying on an affair with Clinton, advancing Sharia law in America. To the Trumpian imagination, Abedin is a bizarre mixture of Osama bin Laden, Rasputin, and Catherine Tramell (the bisexual villain in Basic Instinct).

Speaking on KIRO radio in Seattle yesterday, Trump described Weiner as

“a pervert and just a very sick guy,” and proceeded to make these strange comments:

By the way—check, take a look at where [Abedin] worked, by the way, and take a look at where her mother worked, and works. You take a look at the whole event. But in the case of Anthony Weiner, she’s married to a guy that’s uncontrolled, and uncontrollable. He’s a sick person. And you know she has access to classified information. Huma Abedin has access to classified information. How Hillary got away with that one, nobody will ever know.

Unless you are conversant in the special idiolect of right-wing paranoia, it’s hard to know what Trump is talking about here. Fortunately, Trump’s longtime unofficial aide and hatchetman Roger Stone is a useful translation service. Stone is willing to spell out what Trump only dares hint at.