Does green beer taste better laced with hypocrisy? Does shamrock smell sweeter perfumed with historical amnesia?

We may be about to find out, for this year’s St. Patrick’s Day jamboree at the White House will be a breathtaking celebration of double standards and the willful forgetting of America’s recent past. Even by the crooked yardstick of the Trump administration, the disconnect is surreal: The president will salute the legacy of one wave of immigrants even as he deploys against other immigrants the same calumnies once heaped upon the Irish.

In the blizzard of executive orders, it was easy to miss a proclamation President Trump issued on March 1. The president declared this Irish-American Heritage Month and called on “all Americans to celebrate the achievements and contributions of Irish-Americans to our nation with appropriate ceremonies, activities and programs.” The proclamation could hardly be more upbeat in its praise of the Irish for “overcoming poverty and discrimination and inspiring Americans from all walks of life with their indomitable and entrepreneurial spirit.” Mr. Trump embraced these poor and despised foreigners as the forebears of “the more than 35 million Americans of Irish descent who contribute every day to all facets of life in the United States.”

The Irish are at least as fond as anyone else of being told how great they are, but as an Irish person, I find this more than a little disconcerting. It is like having your chastity praised by a brothel keeper, or your temperance and thrift eulogized by a drunken sailor. The whole thing would be funny if it did not raise the most uncomfortable question: Is it right to applaud the legacy of mass immigration from Ireland because the Irish are white and Christian?