The rolling assassination attempts against prominent critics of President Trump, as well as much of the senior leadership of the Democratic Party, continued on Friday. Authorities in New York and Florida found two additional pipe bombs, bringing the total to 12. Surely it won't be long until we can safely characterize this as a campaign of domestic terrorism. And of course, we're about to jump into another news cycle where, inevitably, the president refuses to accept any responsibility for how his increasingly violent and apocalyptic rhetoric has contributed to the current atmosphere of a nation on the brink.

Check that: he now appears to be suggesting the rolling assassination attempts against his political opponents are a false-flag election stunt by...someone.

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Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows - news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2018

This is obviously some sick, Alex Jones-style evidence-free conspiracy-mongering. The President of the United States is suggesting...what? That the bombs aren't real? That the Democrats bombed themselves? But there's also something else truly sinister in the background here. When the president says "news not talking politics," he's very likely lamenting that Fox News and CNN are no longer giving the wall-to-wall treatment to his number one propaganda piece for this election cycle: The Caravan.

The president and his allies have worked very hard to turn a group of people marching 1,000 miles away, many of whom will not make it to the U.S.-Mexico border and even fewer of whom will gain entrance to the United States, into a faceless horde of brown people dead-set on invading this country. Never mind that they intend to present themselves to immigration authorities legally when they arrive, hoping to get a hearing for their asylum claims—as is their right under international law. Trump has signaled an intent to bar their claims, possibly in violation of international law, and got his supposedly Adult-in-the-Room Secretary of Defense, James "Mad Dog" Mattis, to send 800 federal troops to the border.

John Moore Getty Images

Certainly, there aren't many other issues Republicans seem to want to talk about. They've taken to shamelessly lying about their position on healthcare, and Trump made up a coming tax-cut out of whole cloth when they realized the tax cut for corporations and the wealthy they did pass wasn't going over well with voters. A party platform of cutting social services to give rich people tax cuts isn't particularly effective, so Republicans have turned to a platform of racial resentment and xenophobia and fear for the homestretch of the 2018 midterms. The Caravan is the crown jewel in that effort. When Trump wants cable news to talk "politics" right now, he wants them to talk about his fictional immigrant hordes.

For a while, it wasn't just Fox ginning up the hysteria, which was very much intended to demonize Democrats—whom Trump cast as wanting to throw open the borders and allow the hordes in—and get The Base of scared old white people out to vote. CNN and The New York Times also bit on this sequel to The Ebola Panic (2014) and The Email Protocol (2016). But Republicans' best-laid plans have been disrupted by the very inconvenient development that someone is trying to murder their colleagues across the aisle. Trump's response has been to say the quiet parts out loud: These Bombs Are Crowding Out My Propaganda! You'd think the "very unfortunate" part would be the attempted murder.

This is truly sick stuff, and it follows a 3 a.m. Tweet Machine attack on CNN—which was targeted with a pipe bomb two days ago—and a complaint that he's not getting enough retweets. It would be fun to joke that this is Presidential! if the risk weren't growing by the day that someone is going to get killed in this country.

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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