Like everything else in the Trump Era, the art of the White House tell-all has been transformed into a breathless rat race, as former aides and free-range interlopers capitalize on the chaos to turn the ongoing national disgrace into spicy newsprint and crisp greenbacks. Yet the stories are spicy, the latest series of which hail from another new presidential beach read, Team of Vipers, by ex-White House communications aide Cliff Sims. By all accounts, the book paints a familiar picture of an administration in disarray, led by a man whose particular proclivities make the job...difficult.

One feature of the Trump persona is a kind of spastic projection. The president has a near-constant impulse to accuse others of that which, somewhere deep in his mangled psyche, he surely knows he is guilty. Exhibit A, from Sims via the Washington Post:

The president has also claimed to guests, without evidence, that his private dining room off the Oval Office was in “rough shape” and had a hole in the wall when he came into the West Wing and that President Barack Obama used it to watch sports, according to two White House officials and two other people who have heard him discuss the dining room. “He just sat in here and watched basketball all day,” Trump told a recent group, before saying he upgraded Obama’s smaller TV to a sprawling, flat-screen one, the four people said.

An Obama White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Obama does not generally respond to Trump’s remarks, said that there was no hole in the wall and that Obama rarely worked in the room and did not watch basketball there.

Now, you don't really need an Obama official to tell you he wasn't watching basketball games all day. This is very obviously what Trump does—except he's watching people praise him on Fox News. The New York Times found, after talking to "60 advisers, associates, friends and members of Congress," that Trump watches four to eight hours of TV a day. He watches Fox to feel good about himself and get some ideas, and CNN and MSNBC to get mad. He live-tweets throughout these cable-news marathons, treating what comes through the TV tube as God's own gospel—or, if it's critical of him, as the work of the Devil himself.

JIM WATSON Getty Images

But his swipe at Obama for supposedly doing the same is a fascinating character study. He is just accusing someone else of what he's doing in the hopes that it defuses the charge when it's accurately leveled at him. Another one for the "all politicians do that" archives, a section of the Library of Nonsense.

You do have to wonder, though, if his fabricated story involves "basketball" because Obama used to play himself and make NCAA tournament brackets—or whether there's something else about Obama that makes Trump draw that particular picture. Don't forget that conservative talking heads used to obsessively describe the first black president as "disengaged." Trump launched his political career by suggesting Obama was born in Kenya, and that he could never have gotten into Ivy League schools legitimately. Now he's saying, almost certainly as one of his 15 false claims per day, that the White House was decrepit when Obama lived there.

Stephen Miller, the Santa Monica Gargamel NICHOLAS KAMM Getty Images

Ultimately, though, Trump's petty lies about the White House and his predecessor are secondary to the public policy he's making. Another survey of the new book, this time in The Atlantic, gets at how some of it is being made.

He writes about his struggle to reconcile his Christian faith with working for a president who, for example, “totally lacked nuance” in his attitude toward refugees—particularly “persecuted Christians,” whom Trump “promise[d]” to help but “[never] did.” Sims writes that he took this concern at one point to Stephen Miller, who he writes told him, “I would be happy if not a single refugee foot ever again touched America’s soil.”

That, right there, is the real philosophy.

It's not about "illegal immigration," or "crime," or MS-13. It's about keeping Certain People out. That's why the Trump administration proposed cutting legal immigration in half. That's why they've restricted access to legal ports of entry, where migrants can legally present themselves to apply for asylum according to international law. That's why the administration has sought to restrict the criteria by which you can apply for asylum. They talk about MS-13 and murders committed by undocumented people to try to scare the public into signing onto policies that serve a specific purpose: to keep Those People out. (In reality, immigrants are no more likely to commit crimes than native-born citizens.) That is the symbolism of The Wall. That is why Trump lamented that the United States accepts people from the "shitholes" of Africa and El Salvador and not from Norway.

It's not about the law. Trump has never had any regard for the law. It's about race and power.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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