Presidents celebrate Halloween. They decorate the White House and hand out candy to goons, skeletons, and tiny superheroes. And, in recent years, Presidents have thrown Halloween parties for Administration staffers and their kids in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, where President Obama was famously caught in Spider-Man’s web. Although many adorable photographs have emerged from parties held in the Eisenhower Building, where numerous policy offices are located, there hasn’t been much detailed reporting on, say, what kinds of activities the children of the members of previous Administrations were invited to participate in. But they probably didn’t play “Build the Wall.”

As Yahoo News reported over the weekend, at this year’s White House Halloween party, children of Administration staff members were greeted with a “Build the Wall” mural on the first floor of the Eisenhower Building. “Build the Wall” was spelled out in block letters that appeared to be cut from construction paper, and the children were instructed to write their names on red paper bricks and add them to the mural.

Societies shape their children—and regimes indoctrinate them—through play. According to the Yahoo News report, the wall-building activity was “concerning” to “some attendees,” and at least one guest was “horrified.” Judging from the pictures, though, dozens of children added their bricks to the mural. This is to be expected. The President and his supporters chant “Build the wall!” The President shuts down the government as a result of his desire to build the wall. The President declares a national emergency because he so badly wants to build the wall. Of course the children of his staff members would also want to put a brick in the President’s wall.

But one wonders how an Administration staffer might have come up with the idea of building the wall as a Halloween activity for children. According to the Yahoo report, the rest of the building was decorated in the more familiar ways of the holiday: skeletons and cobwebs and lots of candy. These would facilitate the normal Halloween pastimes of getting scared, scaring others, and consuming sweets. Where does building the wall fit in?

The staff at the Eisenhower Building was reportedly told to prepare child-friendly displays connected with the party’s theme, “When I grow up, I want to be . . .” But do the child guests really aspire to be Pennywise or a skeleton when they grow up? The odd vocational theme was reflected in the build-the-wall attraction, which offered guests the opportunity to join “Trump’s Crew”: there was a second display under that slogan, with a giant cutout of the President wearing a construction hat, alongside a couple of construction outfits and plenty of yellow tape that said “Caution: Kids at Work.” Construction-style signs had Trump-rally slogans on them, such as “Jobs Ahead.” Someone clearly put time and effort into decorating this part of the building. Perhaps, in its usual apparently clueless way, the Administration was being frank. The Trump Presidency is, in its way, like Halloween, but the R-rated, slasher-movie version: a festival of violence, cruelty, and fear.

Getting scared and scaring others are the animating forces of the Trump Presidency. Its politics are built on fear: of the Democrats who want power and your money; of the élites who exclude you; of the crime that’s coming for you in American cities; and, most of all, of immigrants who will take your job, your children, and your future. The Trump Presidency’s appeal is in how it scares others—by staging military parades with flyovers, by dropping the Mother of All Bombs, but, most of all, by building the wall, staging deportation raids, and separating families in order to frighten people away from this country. The wall is a hideous jack-o’-lantern, rotten and glowing on our doorstep, intended to make imaginary evil spirits even more scared of us than we are of them.