After three-plus years, it ought to be clear that Donald Trump's presidency is a runaway freight train. He doesn't stop at any one station for folks to inspect the cargo—he just blows through them. Accountability might be a cornerstone of democratic self-government, but the president is not interested. The strategy is to lurch from scandal to scandal, leaving each behind before the public can truly take stock of what he's just done. Before each bit of vandalism can sink in, there's something new—and often incredibly dumb—to be outraged about. Over time, it all becomes a blur of incompetence, venality, and vitriol, with the hope the constant churn is enough to exhaust or confuse a big enough share of the public to get away with it.

And yet reading The New York Times on Tuesday morning, you'd be forgiven for thinking a different president was in office, one who has not established a clear and lengthy record of ginning up a new controversy to drag the searchlights away from what everyone was just coming around to realizing was a gigantic fuck-up.

President Trump said on Monday evening that he intended to close the United States to people trying to immigrate into the country to live and work, a drastic move that he said would protect American workers from foreign competition once the nation’s economy began to recover from the shutdown caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, “I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

Hold up: I thought the situation was improving so much that we were ready to reopen the country soon? Georgia just started yesterday! Your God-given right to the pursuit of a haircut will soon be restored. But now we need a blanket immigration ban?

This man is fighting for you! The one on the left. Alex Wong Getty Images

The president tweeted this out at 10:06 p.m. last night, after a day in which his complete failure to put in place an adequate testing regime in response to the novel coronavirus pandemic really started to settle in. He signaled earlier in the day he was aware of this. On Twitter, and at his daily I'm in Charge But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault briefing, he complained that people used to talk about ventilators, but they couldn't get him on that, so now they're talking about testing.

In this formulation, the worry about a ventilator shortage was not a reflection of the concerns voiced by hospitals and public-health experts and governors, it was a conspiracy to get the president. The risk of a widespread shortage is down from a few weeks ago, thanks to the success of lockdown efforts in flattening the curve—cutting down on demand—and yes, the Trump administration's work on the supply side. (That this work came after sustained pressure from outside is a good argument for democracy.) And never mind that folks in the scientific community—as well as the Lamestream Fake News Lyin' Media—have been talking about testing for months, and that some countries who have done testing far better than we have are beginning to ease their lockdown restrictions. Testing is critical to safely reopening, and we may not have it sorted out before September while Germany is set to begin reopening in the next week, but why bother with any of those details? It's a gotcha question!

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Anyway, reports are that various lackeys in Trump's orbit see the pathetic testing response as a political liability, and Trump may, too. So even if they've been preparing this immigration order for some time, there's a reason they're rolling it out now. It's not hard to imagine Trump watching cable news at 10 p.m. last night and deciding the conversation needed to be changed. His solution is a questionably legal spasm of nationalist fervor meant to rile up the base while doing little, in real terms, to deal with the pandemic or the economic fallout. The disease is already here. The United States has the world's worst outbreak. Meanwhile, according to the Department of Homeland Security, 459,000 people immigrated here legally in fiscal year 2019. 22 million people have filed for unemployment in the last month. This is a matter of scale, even if you grant that immigrants harm the domestic labor market, which is disputed.

And yet the Paper of Record prints this:

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has used health concerns to justify aggressively restricting immigration. Even before the tweet, it had expanded travel restrictions, slowed visa processing and moved to swiftly bar asylum seekers and undocumented immigrants from entering the country ...

But Mr. Trump’s primary focus appears to be on protecting American workers as the virus ravages what had been a rapidly growing job market.

So it was a Health Thing, but now it's an American Workers Thing? Is it possible that it is just a Political Thing he thinks is in his own interest, and the rationale keeps evolving as a result? Here's the president's own national security adviser on Fox & Friends this morning. It doesn't seem like he got the jobs memo.

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National Security Adviser Robert O'Brien tells Fox & Friends that Trump's move to temporarily ban immigration is about "what's best for the health of the American people." (American has the most coronavirus cases in the world so this doesn't make much sense.) pic.twitter.com/U7v1foxAJb — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 21, 2020

So now it's about health again? What about the American Worker? I'm starting to get the feeling this blanket immigration ban was not the result of a rigorous policymaking process within the White House, one that relied on evidence of the plan's economic benefits for American workers to make the case. It's starting to feel like this might be what it so obviously is: a play, something he can fight with reporters about during Tuesday's edition of the I'm in Charge But Anything That Goes Wrong Is Not My Fault briefing.

The essential issue here is the inability to deal with a bad-faith operator. Donald Trump's public record as a confidence man spans decades. The guy slithered out of personal bankruptcy by taking his money-losing casino business public, and the marks who bought shares met the same fate as the hundreds of contractors who made the fatal mistake of working for him. The idea that this same person now cares deeply about The American Worker requires more evidence than...his word. Surely the guy who woke up the next morning to brag about the great ratings his briefings are getting—42,000 Americans are dead, by the way—spends all his time thinking about the Americans who are unemployed. Maybe the president genuinely thinks this will help workers, but is that really his most likely motivation?

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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