Pierce: The President* Is Rooting for a Bloodbath

The President* Is Rooting for a Bloodbath
Trump brags he's authorized the troops deployed to the border to shoot anyone holding rocks.

BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
NOV 2, 2018

Back when I thought I knew something about politics, and back when I thought I knew something about this country, I believed that, if a President of the United States made regular appearances as an utterly fact-free monster, it largely would be accidental. That was before 2016, when we discovered that a president* could get elected because he was an utterly fact-free monster. That was before 2016, when we learned that 40 years of a political party's constructing an utterly fact-free monster could be such a successful project.

On Thursday, the president* gave another completely non-political talk on his favorite among the things about which he knows less than nothing: immigration. It was entirely about scaring old white people that MS-13 is coming to dominate the town council and order them all to be eaten to celebrate some foreign holiday—and he, alone, can save them.

Before we pay this performance the several seconds of attention it deserves, we should note another triumph for local journalism: The Sacramento Bee leaves the president*'s racist cartoon of a campaign ad as a smoking pile of meat in the breakdown lane. This likely will have no impact on anything but it's important to keep a careful historical record in advance of the president*'s going off into the haunted places of his mind again, the way he did Thursday afternoon. This was perhaps the darkest of the many dark corners.