The president once privately suggested to White House advisors that we shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down, among other venomous ideas.

His comments, reported this week by the New York Times, fit a pattern of inhumanity at the border, now spelled out in black and white. It’s an insight into the mind of Trump and his policy man with a perma-smirk, Stephen Miller.

It’s a clarifying moment: The underlying principle is that they hate these people.

Of course, you can be for tighter controls on immigration without being for cruelty. But this is no longer about how many immigrants we want, or how many deserve asylum here because their lives are in danger.

What we’ve seen under Trump is consistent, needless cruelty: Deliberately separating babies from their parents; congratulating the use of tear gas at the border on women and children in flip-flops.

Now White House advisors say Trump told them we should just shoot these people, many of whom are crossing our border to legally apply for asylum.

He also threw out other caricaturish villainries: a moat filled with snakes and alligators to keep them out; an electrified wall with spikes on top to inflict wounds.

Trump actually asked his advisors to seek a cost estimate for this stuff, they said – which they apparently did, instead of telling him that he was nuts.

On Wednesday, the president dismissed the moat and the wall with spikes in his usual manner, with a tweet calling it “fake news” – although Trump himself once tweeted out a drawing of a border fence with sharp spikes on top.

Noticeably, he didn’t deny suggesting that we shoot migrants. Indeed, he’s said much the same in public. We should fire bullets across the border if a migrant throws a rock, Trump once declared.

He joked about shooting immigrants at Florida appearance, too. Then a deranged admirer actually did so in El Paso, with a manifesto that quoted the president’s rhetoric about a border “invasion.”

Our immigration system is broken, and both Republican and Democratic presidents have tried to address this. But Trump and his misanthropic wonk are different. Both are steeped in the fear-mongering world of right wing talk radio, and are against immigration, period – unless it’s from “places like Norway.”

Trump has complained about immigrants trying to “infest” America, and made it clear he’s talking about the “shithole countries” populated by people who are not white. When it comes to stopping their immigration, he is willing to leave any moral, humanitarian or legal implications aside.

Even Kirstjen Nielsen, who carried out and defended Trump’s singularly harsh family separation policy, was forced out as Homeland Security chief because she did so only reluctantly. She didn’t delight in it, the way Miller did.

Nor does every Trump voter, based on reports from Trump country. When a pillar of the Granger, Indiana community – a business owner who lived here nearly 20 years – was snatched from his U.S. citizen wife and children and deported to Mexico, his neighbors who backed Trump spoke out against it.

“I voted for him because he said he was going to get rid of the bad hombres,” local resident Dave Keck told 60 Minutes. “Roberto is a good hombre.”

Cruel policies and chants like “go back where you came from” are easier to adopt in the abstract. The closer you get, the better you see the neighbor torn from his family; the mother whose wailing toddler was taken from her.

This is the real Donald Trump, and he is the bad hombre.

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