Photo : Andrew Harnik ( AP )

When President Donald Trump announced that he’d be hosting an event honoring the “heroes of ICE and CBP,” you may have thought to yourself, “Well, that sure sounds like it’s gonna be a complete horror show.” And now that it’s come and gone, it’s my unfortunate duty to inform you that, yes, it sure was.


First off, the President of the United States was utterly incapable of actually naming one of the terror agencies he was ostensibly “saluting.” Not once, not twice, but at every single instance, Trump proudly declared his support for ICE and “CBC”—an acronym that does not, as he presumably believe, stand for the Customs and Border Protection agency. Was he thinking of the Congressional Black Caucus? The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation? Cool Blog Content? Only he knows.



And before you wonder whether he was simply reading the extremely simple words being projected onto the teleprompter in front of him, I’m afraid not. According to witnesses in the room, the prepared remarks did, in fact, correctly identify CBP—an agency which is still extremely bad, mind you —as the agency of honor. Whoops!

But the fun didn’t stop there.

As he often does, Trump stopped his remarks several times to invite various audience members up to the microphone to tell him how good he is. Among those drafted to speak today was Border Patrol agent Adrian Anzaldua, who was among the CBP officials which rescued 76 undocumented immigrants who’d been crammed into the back of a trafficker’s truck after crossing into the United States.


Calling up the understandably surprised Anzaldua—who appears to be Latinx—Trump declared “you’re not nervous, right?” before turning to the crowd and explaining that the agent “speaks perfect English.”

The rest of the event featured Trump’s signature anti-immigrant screeds about “liberating” cities in Long Island, tarring Democrats as “obstructionists” who “don’t mind crime,” and predicting—against just about all current indications—that there will be a “red wave” of Republicans elected in November. So even if Trump was incredibly racist towards a guy whose job is to help the president carry out his xenophobic agenda, and even if he couldn’t remember who the hell he was honoring in the first place, at least he still knows how to pl ay the hits.

