Presidential, was it?

Even I didn't believe they could lower the bar far enough that an otherwise sensible fellow like Van Jones would take the indecent exploitation of a war widow's fresh sorrow and turn it into Lincoln's Second Inaugural. Even I didn't believe they could sink the bar far enough into Middle Earth that otherwise critical observers would look at a pile of deceptive leaves and see a coherent tree. Every day in every way, this administration and this president* taxes the far limits of even my cynicism. For example, it is not true that nobody profits from "lawless chaos." How do you think Vladimir Putin created the gangster's paradise that helped Rex Tillerson and Wilbur Ross get even more wealthy?

When one calls that speech "presidential," whose presidency are you summoning? Pierce? Buchanan? Rufus T. Firefly? Jesus, people, at least try to sound like you graduated middle school.

Hard to believe, but the second day punditry, after otherwise sensible folks had a night to sleep on it, is even worse than the instant analysis on Tuesday night. What Trump did with Carryn Owens was bad enough on the merits, coming as it did after he spent 48 hours fobbing off the blame of the botched raid into Yemen on everybody who walked past the White House in the past three months. But to hear it now described as a powerful, emotional evocation of the unifying power of the presidency, instead of one more rank attempt at deflecting the moral responsibility for the death of the person being mourned, is to abandon critical thinking and give your responsibility to the truth over to unthinking slobber.

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But, then again, as Senator Charles Schumer said during the lengthy fumigation period that followed it, the entire speech was an exercise in divorcing acts from their consequences, words from their meanings, and reality from rhetoric. That it was delivered without conspicuous drooling, or without another lengthy airing of grievances, doesn't make it less so. Anyone who's used the word "tone" in any connection to this address needs to spend a lengthy stretch in the pundit's penalty box, if not in the public pillory.

The speech was chock-full of barefaced non-facts regarding crime, immigrants, crime committed by immigrants, the accomplishments of the current administration, and the condition of the country when it handed itself over to his half-baked stewardship last November. I don't care if you sell your mendacity in perfect iambic pentameter in the voice of Laurence Olivier. It's still bullshit, and dangerous bullshit at that. And it will sell. That's the heart and start of it. The people who bought this when it was poured out to them straight up during the campaign certainly will buy it now that it's mixed with some sweetener lifted whole from every middle-school graduation speech ever given.

There is one portion of the speech that transcended the obvious prevarication and sent the speech spiraling into the near suburbs of outright fascism.

I have ordered the Department of Homeland Security to create an office to serve American Victims. The office is called VOICE—Victims Of Immigration Crime Engagement. We are providing a voice to those who have been ignored by our media, and silenced by special interests.

What media ignored these crimes? What special interests silenced their families? He doesn't know and he doesn't care.

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Is it even necessary to outline how perilous to democracy this is? You can see it even without being reminded that, a) under Steve Bannon's leadership, Breitbart inaugurated a section called "Black Crime," or b) the Nazi regime constructed an elaborate bureaucratic mechanism to catalogue alleged Jewish crimes against innocent Aryan citizens, although you probably ought to keep those two precedents in mind. The Department of Homeland Security never has been a terrific idea, but to invest something like this new propaganda ministry with the power and influence of an actual Cabinet department is like giving Steve Bannon's old news sewer its own Special Forces.

Do you trust this administration—or this president*, or the people around him—to work these numbers on the square? Does anybody believe that this administration—or this president*, or the people around him—won't cook the books any time they need a boost in the polls, or any time they need to scare Congress into doing something? Does anybody believe these figures won't be put to violent use out in the country by the people who firmly believe that ISIL has set up shop in a storefront down next to the Piggly Wiggly?

It is to abandon critical thinking and give your responsibility to the truth over to unthinking slobber.

I never have heard a president suggest anything like this. At least Nixon had the decency to put the Plumbers together on the down-low. This is an open attempt to delegitimize the truth—and to delegitimize the people whose job it is to tell the truth—in favor of outright government-sponsored propaganda that can be turned into repressive action against some of the most vulnerable people in our society. No wonder there were gasps in the chamber when he proposed this abomination. I'm surprised the paint on the walls didn't fall off.

(And may I just say, for the record, that anybody who fell for the pre-speech palaver about how the president* was going to make a Nixon-In-China flipperoo on immigration is a sucker who should not be allowed to handle their own money.)

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To me, this was the money shot. Authoritarianism is bone deep in these guys. It is their instinct, their unconquerable reflex, to reach for the most repressive solution against the most vulnerable target at hand. It is the wellspring of everything else: the lies, the criminal exploitation of a woman's grief, the constant need for affirmation, the even-more-constant assertion of the president*s demonstrated greatness, and speeches like the one on Tuesday night, which really was nothing more than a list of banal solutions to largely imaginary problems.

That they're really bad at being authoritarians is not going to be enough to keep it at bay forever. They'll get better at it. They already are better at it, which is what all the bloviating about "tone" is really all about. That tone is nothing more than a bell tolling, deep in the national psyche, summoning us to act on our worst impulses and, by acting on them, ennoble them. It is a bell tolling, and it tolls for thee, motherfckers. It tolls for thee.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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