October's jobs report confirms the economy is chugging along quite well: unemployment remains low, job growth is strong, and wages are finally beginning to tick up. Yeah, the stock market just erased all of its gains for the year—if you lost sight of your 401(k), take a glance downwards. But overall, if you ignore almost everything else, things are pretty good. It would be a strong enough message for a normal political party to run on, but the Republican Party in the United States of America is not a normal party. It is led by an increasingly manic pathological liar whose closing argument heading into the midterms is that hordes of criminal brown people are swarming towards the southern border and Democrats want to let them in.

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Never mind that the fascist propaganda video President Trump has pinned to his account on the Tweet Machine is completely at odds with reality. Not only is his ploy to hold up cop-killer Luis Bracamontes as representative of the undocumented immigrant community a propagandistic appeal to racism and xenophobia, but also his claims Democrats are responsible for allowing Bracamontes to enter and stay in America are totally false. It turns out he was deported under President Bill Clinton and re-entered the country under President George W. Bush. This is a tangled web of lies and distortions and misinformation, part of, according to a Washington Post report out Friday, the more than 6,400 false claims Trump has made in office. That's more than 10 per day, a stunning onslaught that has left the Post fact-checkers on the ropes. In the seven weeks leading up to the election, he's made 30 a day.

But none of that will matter to the president. He's mostly ignoring the economy and his record of stuffing the federal courts with conservative judges, choosing instead to quadruple-down on the naked race-baiting of The Caravan. Maybe it's because his tax cut for corporations and the rich hasn't gone over that well with the general public, or because he fears an Economy Discussion might quickly give way to a Healthcare Discussion—which Republicans ain't looking to have, except when they're lying about protecting preexisting conditions.

No, he's all about The Closing Message. You can tell because—remarkably, not for the first time—he is publicly complaining that a recent spasm of right-wing political violence is dampening his "momentum."

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Trump on mail bomb campaign and Pittsburgh massacre: "We did have two maniacs stop a momentum that was incredible." pic.twitter.com/ffn4C5jklW — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) November 2, 2018

Everything in the world exists only as it relates to him. Really, this is not the first time he's moaned that acts of right-wing domestic terrorism—some of which was perpetrated by suspects who explicitly cited conspiracy theories the president has pushed, and which he has continued to push afterwards—is crowding his message out of the news cycle. Does it even resonate with him, really, that 11 people were shot to death in a Pittsburgh synagogue? That their families have had their lives irrevocably altered by an act of explicitly anti-Semitic violence?

Sadly, it appears the president is entirely incapable of even performing empathy. He went to Pittsburgh and made a video all about him, which he tweeted out with text bragging about how much respect he was shown on his visit. He used the opportunity to endorse a local Republican on the basis he showed "a sincere level of compassion, grief, and sorrow" at the Pittsburgh memorial, which left the United States president impressed. It leaves you with the impression Trump thinks the guy was just doing a great acting job. No one actually feels things for people they've never met, do they?

Anyway, back to The Caravan.

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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