For much of the sentient world, Donald Trump’s deranged and appalling reference to Haiti, El Salvador, and African countries as “shithole” nations during a White House meeting on immigration reform, held last Thursday, became the latest evidence of, among other things, the president’s mental instability, the possibly irreparable descent of our democracy into an abysmal cesspool, and the chilling extent to which we have reversed decades of racial progress—the last of which was especially notable given the proximity of the remarks to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The horrendous statement would drive the news cycle for four days, somehow proving that things could get worse for Trump than his depiction in Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury. Even the president appeared to understand, on some level, that he had spoken with woeful ignorance. By Sunday, Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, both Trump loyalists, said that they couldn’t quite recall the word used in the meeting, and attempted to publicly walk back the remark by proxy. As the weekend drew to a close, likely sensing the need to open a new front on their war with the media, the White House accused The Wall Street Journal of misquoting the president regarding his amorous relationship with erratic warmonger Kim Jong Un.

On the far right, however, the president’s use of the word “shithole” was largely celebrated as Trumpism in its purest, most puerile form. “Donald Trump’s first instinct that ‘shithole’ would play well with his base was spot on,” Kurt Bardella, a longtime Republican press-relations professional and the former spokesman for Breitbart News, told me. “No issue throughout the past two decades has had a more energizing and mobilizing effect on the conservative base and media than immigration.”

Indeed, the digital redoubts of the far-right were buzzing with excitement to see all their favorite adversaries—Democrats, celebrities, CNN anchors—so apoplectic. Responses ranged from the far-fetched and bizarre, like that of Fox News host Jesse Watters, who noted that “this is how the forgotten men and women in America talk at the bar,” to much, much worse. Some, such as one Infowars editor, rejoiced that Trump had validated their beliefs that such countries were dumps. “Trump is more or less on the same page as us with regards to race and immigration,” an editor at the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer wrote, calling Trump’s comments “encouraging and refreshing.” Gateway Pundit, an ostensible news site more prone to spouting conspiracy theories, gleefully shared images and video of starving Venezuelans in an apparent, and ghastly, effort to prove the president correct. (The president, notably, did not mention Venezuela in his crude remarks.) On M.L.K. Day, the site offered an even more outrageous argument: “Martin Luther King Jr. Would Have Stood With Trump: He Didn’t Want Migrants From The Third World Here Either.”

Breitbart, meanwhile, gleefully published stories about outraged, reliably liberal Hollywood celebrities (singling out Sean Penn at one point), as well as a host of triggered journalists from the “Shithole of Fake News.” Infowars decided to take a cultural angle, writing up unaffiliated news stories and inserting “shithole” in the heads for no intelligible reason. (“State Dept. Warns: Avoid Travel to Shithole Countries.”)

They all seemed to share a similar strategy. Given the inarguable ghastliness of Trump’s comments, the far-right focused less on the indefensible statement itself than how seriously the left and media were taking the incident, a collective behavior that they attempted to portray as sanctimonious umbrage. “What they’re doing is focusing on the idea that, well, is it rude to say that x impoverished country is a shithole?“ said Will Sommer, a campaign editor at The Hill and the author of the Right Richter newsletter. The public hand-wringing over whether to print the word “shithole” merely fueled the right’s apparent glee. “I can tell you this is all faux rage . . . It is made up,” Rush Limbaugh seethed to his listeners, in a segment that was temporarily pushed on Breitbart’s front page. “It is for the cameras. It’s for the microphones. It’s for the audience.”