Even some of the president's most ardent defenders seemed taken aback by this decision. Piers Morgan, the British pundit whose career's second act consists largely of writing pro-Trump takes and casual racism apologia for the Daily Mail, publicly implored him to "undo the retweets." He has not undone the retweets. Now, Britain First, which runs a prolific meme-generating operation but has struggled to earn mainstream acceptance or media coverage or actual political power in the UK, immediately earned an interview slot on CBS News. And once again, perhaps the most delighted response to this entire episode came from the leader a group that consists of, as the president once put it, "very fine people."

At least one of the videos appears to be fake news—there is no evidence that the perpetrator in the first video, according to the Dutch video-sharing site that originally posted it, is either Muslim or a migrant—but who cares? "Whether it's a real video, the threat is real," explained White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. "His goal is to promote strong border security and strong national security." Donald Trump's intended audience is unlikely to take the time to verify the authenticity of Islamophobic agitprop, and even if they did, the reactions from David Duke and his ilk demonstrate that the President of the United States throwing his full-blown support behind an explicitly anti-Muslim platform is a victory that renders such inconvenient details irrelevant.

Again, carefully dissecting the president's tweets is sort of an exercise in contradiction, because imputing some kind of ingenious, nine-dimensional chess motive to each of them is wasteful when the overwhelming body of evidence indicates that he's just an elderly bigot who tweets stuff because he feels like it. Whether he intended it or not, though, Donald Trump's early-morning Twitter blasts function as an effective test for just how much casual racism the President of the United States can endorse without facing meaningful consequences. It is a soft launch of right-of-right, European-style neofascism as official White House policy. Sure enough, administration officials are already spinning the episode as overblown, and in news that will no doubt shock you, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell—who, at this point, can practically taste Donald Trump's signature gracing their elusive tax cuts for the ultra-rich—have developed a mysterious and debilitating allergy to microphones.

While Ku Klux Klan racists might enjoy the Donald Trump experience, Donald Trump is not a Ku Klux Klan racist. The danger, instead, lies in the president's discovery that embracing bigotry is a viable political strategy. His penchant for xenophobic screeds might once have been an annoyance tolerated by the GOP establishment in service of their policy agenda, but now that the unified Republican government has failed to fulfill many of its most ambitious campaign promises, his ability to keep the otherwise-disgruntled base engaged in this manner is starting to look like one of the most powerful tools available in the party's arsenal.

As his poll numbers continue to flounder and Robert Mueller's omnipresent investigation continues to expand, the president's rhetoric is going to get more inflammatory, not less. And with midterm elections less than a year away, you can expect Republican leadership, at every opportunity they have to rebuke him, to instead remain cravenly silent. This unchecked appeal to the lowest common denominator will do incalculable damage to this country and place American lives in unnecessary danger, but as trial balloons like today's demonstrate, he is quickly learning that he can get away with it.