I don’t know. Even I would tend to give this president* something of a break on his reaction to the massacre in Florida. He said the bare bones of things that we expect presidents to say, even though I’m willing to bet the Bibles at Mar-A-Lago remain un-cracked and that the president* couldn’t find the actual quote from Scripture that he cited if you spotted him St. Jerome and King James:

"I’m making plans to visit Parkland, to meet with families and local officials and to continue coordinating the federal response. In these moments of heartache and darkness, we hold on to God’s word in Scripture: 'I have heard your prayer and seen your tears, I will heal you.'"

Strangely, no president elected in my lifetime has a better sense of the violence that is marbled throughout American culture than this one does. He knows it because he used it to get elected. He knows it because he saw it in the blazing eyes of the people at his rabid rallies. He knows it because, quite frankly, he is addicted to the thrill of it.

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Because of that, he supercharged a politics in which sincerity already was a sucker’s game, a tactic to be derided and mocked. Because of that, nobody expects him to mean what he says, because that would mark you as a sap who believes that politics can be a constructive endeavor, and that government, whatever its faults, is something to which we all contribute, even those people who don’t think they’re contributing at all.

I could tick off a dozen ways in which the president* was being deceptive on Thursday. He talked about the crisis in mental health. However, his budget cuts deeply into Medicaid, which is how a great deal of the mental healthcare in this country is provided. He is summoning people to the White House—Soon!—to talk about mental health. I wonder if they’ll discuss how, last February, he signed an order reversing an Obama-era directive that had made it more difficult for people with mental illness to obtain a firearm.

He started the day badly, sending out a tweet that seemed to blame part of Nikolas Cruz’s rampage on the other students at Stoneman Douglas High School who failed to report Cruz’s erratic and violent behavior, even though a lot of people at that school, students and faculty, clearly had done so.

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So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 15, 2018

That pretty much queered the pitch for his statement later Thursday morning. But he laid the groundwork for his insincerity long ago, in all those rallies where people pretended to believe that there would be a big beautiful wall that Mexico would pay for because, to do so, was to strike back at the monsters in their heads. They were bound to him by insincerity and fantasy. It was really the only thing they had in common and, as it turns out, it’s the only thing he can share with the nation he purports to lead.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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