For a short while after Donald Trump's election in 2016, I wondered if, for all his bombastic campaign-trail rhetoric, the substantive task of governing would blunt the impact of his worst impulses, burying them at the bottom of a long checklist of practical responsibilities that no president manages to get all the way through. Even if his late-stage embrace of the GOP's extreme right wing was authentic—a proposition which, given his history, was not guaranteed at the time—perhaps Washington's bureaucratic inertia would prove insurmountable. Perhaps he'd find that he had too much to do in the Oval Office for his racism to change the world like he promised.

But nope. For all its myriad policy failings, the one thing at which this White House has managed to excel is making life in America hell for brown people.

The headlines of the past few weeks alone are somehow as notable for their depravity as they are for their unremarkability: The administration is branding abused migrant children as future criminals, and stopping American citizens for the suspected crime of speaking Spanish, and revoking temporary protected status for refugees, and separating children from their parents at the border—an unconscionable practice employed for the express purpose of denying the humanity of its victims, just as it was 150 years ago. As Americans prepare to spend a holiday weekend honoring their country's fallen heroes by grilling hamburgers and wearing novelty red-white-and-blue clothing in public, the government has lost track of nearly 1,500 unaccompanied migrant children that it placed somewhere within its borders.

Donald Trump has rightly earned a lot of attention for saying vile things—for launching his political career on the back of a racist lie, and for assembling the world's most voluminous collection of dog whistles, and for announcing his presidential bid by calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, and so on and so forth. Just yesterday, the Washington Post told us of the mock kangaroo courts he holds in the Oval Office whenever the topic of immigration comes up.

Acting as if he was at a rally, he then read aloud a few made up Hispanic names and described potential crimes they could have committed, like rape or murder. Then, he said, the crowds would roar when the criminals were thrown out of the country—as they did when he highlighted crimes by illegal immigrants at his rallies, according to a person present for the exchange and another briefed on it later. Miller and Kushner laughed.

News stories are effective at reporting on his words, like "shitholes," which is how he described Haiti and African countries when expressing his preference for Nordic immigrants. News stories are not as good, however, at doing justice to how his policies affect people's lives, especially when the horrors of those policies start to blend together.

This isn't a criticism so much as it is a recognition of the limits of the medium: "Donald Trump made a gross remark" and "Donald Trump deported children today" take up the same amount of space, but mean very different things. As he imbues with the force of law his contempt for people who don't look like him, it's hard to avoid feeling numb to the fresh anecdotes of state-sanctioned depravity that never seem to stop coming. The people in charge are really good at flooding the market.

Things aren't going to get better, either. Making people feel proud of their bigotry and xenophobia is what got him this far. And as the midterms draw nearer, and his approval ratings remain in the toilet, and Robert Mueller's investigation penetrates further into Trump's inner circle, fighting the culture wars will become the only act left in his repertoire that makes his supporters excited anymore. In an America that Donald Trump has managed to set in flames, that might be enough.