Writing at the conservative Bulwark, a columnist shredded Donald Trump for pushing “stupid” ideas on Twitter and in his public appearances that are designed to rile up his gullible base, because the president has no idea how to do his job or how government works.

According to Andrew Egger, the president is “governing by meme” — by which he means substituting glib or outrageous statements in place of proposing anything that could reasonably be called a serious policy proposal.

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“In the age of Trump, an age full of little irritations, perhaps none has been so maddening as this: the constant, patronizing insistence of MAGAsphere taste-makers that nothing is really as it appears,” Egger began. “It’s only to your deranged mind, they cluck, that the president seems erratic and spasmodic, yanked this way and that by his raging id and the yakkers on TV. So perhaps one can’t help but feel a stab of perverse pleasure when Trump does something so transcendently, ostentatiously stupid and short-sighted that his esoteric readers have no choice but to grit their teeth and look the other way.”

The columnist suggests that Trump has no intention of shipping immigrants to sanctuary cities, but is just out to “own the libs” and delight his fans.

“In the initial aftermath of the report, many on the right scoffed about it as much ado about a dumb, quickly discarded idea,” he explained. “Unfortunately, someone forgot to give this memo to the president. Because Trump has taken quite a shine to the idea.”

“As policy, just for the record, the proposal is beyond asinine. Trump is saying, right out in the open, that he wants to use the levers of power to make things worse for his political enemies—the kind of thing that would be enough to end the careers of most politicians all by itself,” Egger accused. “For the president of the United States, this isn’t a policy. It’s a meme. It’s owning the libs.”

According to the columnist, Trump has been floating the sanctuary city idea to fill the immigrant-bashing void since unceremoniously forcing his latest Department of Homeland Security head, Kirstjen Nielsen, out.

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“All this is happening in the immediate aftermath of Trump blowing up his entire immigration and border security team, from DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen on down, and replacing officials he believed to be slow-walking his agenda,” Egger wrote. “This, too, was grounds for celebration for a certain type of MAGAite: All those deep-staters were secretly trying to stymie the Trump immigration agenda, but no more! It’s pedal to the metal now!”

“It’s par for the course for the Trump White House, which has for years been busily dismantling its institutional guardrails in the interest of allowing more and more executive policy to be dictated by the president’s changing whims” he lamented before bitterly adding, “In throwing his support behind a counterproductive policy with no aim other than lib-ownership, Trump is showing that this strategy has reached another high-water mark.”

You can read more here.