When Trump led services for the faithful in Washington, Michigan Saturday night, he dribbled out this particular bit of word salad:

"A woman lawyer, she said, 'I know nothing.' Now, she supposedly -- you know why? Putin and the group said, 'Trump is killing us. Why don't you say you are involved with government so that we can go and make their life in the United States even more chaotic?'"

He's talking about Natalia Veselnitskaya, who met with Donald Trump Jr and other top campaign officials at Trump Tower in the summer of 2016 -- promising dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Veselnitskaya insisted she had no ties to the Russian government, but she's now admitted she's a Kremlin informant.

In an NBC interview last week, she said, "I am a lawyer, and I am an informant. Since 2013, I have been actively communicating with the office of the Russian prosecutor general."

And how does Trump explain it? It's because Trump is so hard on Putin that Putin wants to get even by having Veselnitskaya say she worked with the Kremlin -- because chaos!

From the Chaos Demon himself.

He holds these rallies because those people are the only ones who still believe him, no matter what. And he really, really needs that.