Donald Trump, American president, was in fine fettle Thursday night as he held a rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was another station in his victory lap over The Barr Letter, which is not The Mueller Report, which no one has seen. But that small detail was never going to matter to a president who said 15 false things in public every day last year, who has relentlessly meddled in the Justice Department and the investigation, and who gave Barr the attorney general job after he wrote a 19-page memo attacking the Mueller investigation. We can safely assume the president had nothing—repeat: NOTHING!—to do with Barr's decision to summarize the 300-plus-page report's findings in a four-page letter which Trump and his allies have now used for a scorched-earth public relations campaign.

You can be sure of that because, almost as soon as the rally began last night, Trump jumped right into his discussion of "the report," which has not been released, and its findings. In a feat of pure Trumpian expertise, he managed to fire off two-to-three misleading claims in a single, fairly short, sentence: "The special counsel completed its report and found no collusion and no obstruction."

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We're one minute in and Trump has already blatantly lied about the Mueller report. (Mueller did not exonerate him of obstruction.) pic.twitter.com/AnFvt8KQuY — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

Again: while the report was completed, we haven't seen it.

The claim the special counsel found "no collusion" is also not entirely accurate: in one of the few lines from the actual Report quoted in the Letter, Mueller says he did not find sufficient evidence of conspiracy or coordination between the Trump campaign and the Russian government to press charges. That is highly specific, and is not necessarily the same as "no collusion," particularly because we have heard no explanation for the Trump Tower Meeting or the Trump Tower Moscow deal or a whole lot else.

And then, of course, the idea Mueller found "no obstruction" is a complete lie, even according to the Letter. Barr is clear that Mueller did not decide one way or the other, but that the special counsel explicitly said the Report "does not exonerate" Trump on the charge. Barr decided, in his infinite, objective wisdom, not to press the obstruction charge. This has nothing to do with the fact Barr specifically said the obstruction probe was illegitimate in his 19-page cover letter before he'd seen any non-public details of the investigation.

But there was no time to linger on the charges themselves. There were Very Presidential things to do! After goading the attendant faithful into repeatedly booing the media and calling the investigation a hoax, Trump took on Democrat Adam Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee:

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TRUMP: "Little pencil neck Adam Schiff. He has the smallest, thinnest neck I have ever seen. He is not a long-ball hitter." #BeBest pic.twitter.com/NW7oU3z4Il — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

Wow! Nice one! It's always nice to hear some Locker Room Talk from the President of the United States, who is now making a habit of dismissing high-ranking government officials based on their prowess on the links. This seems to be the latest salvo in the Republican war on Schiff, who responded yesterday by laying out the mountains of public evidence that the Trump campaign's dealings with various Russians were completely insane.

Having engaged in some requisite bullying, the U.S. president embarked on his latest Totally Normal rant about how he is an Elite:

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TRUMP: "I get a kick, I hear: 'So and so, the elite.' Then you see this guy, like, this little schlepper. 'This is elite? I'm not elite?'" pic.twitter.com/HNDbSeUbLn — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

You would think the world's most powerful man would not need the reassurance of a crowd's cheers to believe he is "elite." He's the President of the United States. Score another point for George Conway.



After a love letter to the Fox News hosts who serve him on State TV, and a rare Presidential Curse Word as Trump asked whether Democrats will continue "defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit," it was on to some barely intelligible ruminations on our world. First up? The nearby Great Lakes.

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TRUMP: "I support the Great Lakes. Always have. They are beautiful. They are big. Very deep. Record deepness, right?" pic.twitter.com/GCSXHp5RdG — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 28, 2019

"Record deepness," indeed. That also describes the president's intellectual curiosity.

And then there were The Windmills.

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TRUMP: "If Hillary got in... you'd be doing wind. Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn't blow, you can forget about television for that night. 'Darling, I want to watch television.' 'I'm sorry! The wind isn't blowing.' I know a lot about wind." pic.twitter.com/tGsUIoUmUQ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

The president's animosity towards wind power is one of these policy positions he's adopted out of some bizarre simmering resentment from his personal life before politics. When a Scottish firm tried to build a wind farm off the coast of his golf course there, Trump went intergalactic with fear that it would ruin the sea views. That's when he first started concern-trolling about how windmills kill birds. Yeah, he's a regular PETA member, that's why his administration has made it a priority to dismantle the Endangered Species Act.

And finally, it was time for a propaganda extravaganza. First up was healthcare.

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Trump is out here talking about a nonexistent health care plan that he says is an improvement on the ACA as though it actually exists pic.twitter.com/vQovxLklUW — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

Trump has no healthcare plan. The thing he is talking about here does not exist. One way to know is that they tried for a whole year to repeal Obamacare, but Republicans never came up with a workable solution. They lost that battle, and then lost the 2018 midterms—in large part on that issue. Now Trump, bullish because of his pet attorney general's letter and the media cowing that has ensued, is returning to that issue with...more bullshit.

Then it was immigration. After outright lying about a congressional resolution on his national emergency—some Senate Republicans joined with Democrats to pass a bill rejecting his phony declaration and his unconstitutional pursuit of funding for his Big, Beautiful Wall—Trump offered his take on asylum-seekers at the border.

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Trump mocks immigration lawyers and asylum seekers pic.twitter.com/ekYhGcFLpa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

Jesus Christ, man.

Here are a couple of migrant stories, courtesy of the liberal rag known as the Wall Street Journal:

Mayra Hernandez carries all her belongings in a bag on her head and in a backpack. The trip has taken a toll on the 36-year-old mother from Tegucigalpa—she has battled infection and a high fever. Ms. Hernandez used to rise at 4 a.m. daily to make and sell tortillas in the country’s capital, but keeping up with extortion payments to the gangs had become too difficult. She could no longer afford her daughter’s textbook and school-uniform fees. “I can’t raise my daughter in a place like that,” she said...

Mariela, who declined to give her surname, stands out among the crowd of Salvadorans. A whistle hangs from her neck. She left El Salvador with her son and a brother, and she says the crowd of migrants can be tricky. “When I don’t know where they are, I whistle hard,” Mariela said. She and her relatives are camping in Tecún Umán’s main square. She said she decided to migrate after she received death threats when she started to investigate her brother’s murder in a gang killing. “Our lives are in danger. The situation in El Salvador is worse than during the war in the 1980s. Back then, you knew who was who. Nowadays, you can get killed by anyone for any reason,” she said.

Of course, the United States of America is intimately acquainted with "the war in the 1980s."

But the coup de grace was a new favorite among conservatives: the idea Democrats want to allow doctors to execute babies after they're born.

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Trump falsely accuses Democrats of wanting to allow doctors to execute babies "after birth." His audience responds with huge boos. pic.twitter.com/iMG2V3RYPN — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 29, 2019

This is truly sick at this point, and it's little wonder that the line outside the rally featured dozens or even hundreds of people in "Q" gear. That's the conspiracy theory that holds the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of people who eat children, which Trump and Robert Mueller (!) have teamed up to destroy. Like all of these cults, the leader—an anonymous commenter on a message board—has repeatedly predicted a Day of Reckoning that comes and goes with nothing to show for it. Even the submission of the Mueller Report, which brought no new indictments, has not taken any wind out of the sails. Presumably it would have indicted the Clintons for toddler-eating, no?

These are the questions we now ask ourselves in this post-reality. Above all else, Donald Trump is a triumph of the visceral id over the better angels of fact and reason that dug humanity out of the Dark Ages through the Enlightenment. There's no way to know that anything is true—it's about what you feel. Truths about our world we have discovered as a species through painstaking application of the scientific method are dismissed with a wave of the hand, replaced with phantasmagorical thinking that pours forth from The Leader's mouth—and which always happens to be useful to The Leader. The media, but especially the tech giants who have refused to accept their roles as the gatekeepers of information in our society, will need to wise up quick. We are on the brink.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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