While the country obsessed over Donald Trump's Neanderthal dating tips last week, it may have overlooked that he had authenticated his status as a dangerous ignoramus who refuses to acknowledge facts.

Consider his most recent response to the infamous Central Park Jogger case, which has compelled Trump to take his cognitive dissonance to a level that should scare every voter.

In the spring of 1989, New York was convulsed by the rape and beating of a young white woman in Central Park. Four young blacks and one Latino - all 14 or 15 years old - were arrested for the crime, and Trump led the pitchforks-and-torches parade.

Indeed, he even narrated this tale, buying full-page ads in four New York newspapers that called for the reinstatement of the death penalty.

In short order, the so-called Central Park Five were coerced into confessing a crime they did not commit, and spent more than a decade in prison. It was an institutional failure on every level: The cops, the prosecution, and the tabloid media carry the shame to this day.

Ultimately, DNA evidence - and the confession of the actual assailant - proved the innocence of the five young men in 2002. After a 14-year court battle, they settled a civil case with the city for $41 million. Even then, Trump called the settlement "the heist of the century," and he said that it didn't prove their innocence.

You'd think a few years of introspection would change his perspective.

Hardly. Here's Trump's version of the truth, shared on CNN last week:

"They admitted they were guilty," he said. "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous."

This disdain for jurisprudence is what you'd expect from the leader of the Philippines, not the United States.

One of the CP5, Yusef Salaam, wrote an Washington Post op-ed Wednesday after watching Trump slog through his Jim Crow fantasy.

"In some ways, I feel like I'm on trial all over again," Salaam wrote. "I realize, too, that I'm not the only victim. Trump has smeared dozens of people, with no regard for the truth."

The jogger case was the first time Trump manipulated the public with racist demagoguery, a role he has reprised effectively many times since.

Give him this much: He may be malicious and ill-informed, but he is consistent. He offers consistent reminders of the danger he would pose as a curator of our federal justice system.

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