Donald Trump's government shutdown has ended, and, for now, he still doesn't have his useless border wall. When all was said and done, the president accepted a deal that he'd originally rejected over a month prior and seemingly accomplished nothing except for hurting hundreds of thousands of federal workers and losing the support of people like Ann Coulter.

Friday was already a bad day for Trump with his longtime confidant and former campaign adviser Roger Stone being arrested and indicted in Robert Mueller's investigation. With these two looming clouds over him, Trump has once again reached for the cudgel that's worked most consistently to rally his base and distract from his most recent fuck-ups: anti-immigrant fear-mongering. Early Saturday morning, he announced on Twitter that yet another migrant caravan is on the way:

We have turned away, at great expense, two major Caravans, but a big one has now formed and is coming. At least 8000 people! If we had a powerful Wall, they wouldn’t even try to make the long and dangerous journey. Build the Wall and Crime will Fall!

Trump has used these caravans and lied about them before, notably in the run up to the midterm elections. The truth is they're far from uncommon and are typically full of women, children, and families—people who benefit from the safety of traveling in large groups. A wall wouldn't do anything to deter them because the majority apply for asylum either in the U.S. or in Mexico. But the president portrays them as Walking Dead-esque hoards of maybe-terrorists, and even reputable news outlets have, intentionally or not, aped his rhetoric.

It's been said before, but if we are truly hellbent on spending billions of dollars to prevent caravans like this in the future, then it would be a lot more effective to put that money toward rebuilding infrastructure and industry in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which are largely in depressed and dysfunctional states in the first place because of aggressive, anti-democratic U.S. intervention. But it's hard to whip a crowd into a frenzy talking about that, and it doesn't rhyme.