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Back when I thought I knew something about politics, and back when I thought I knew something about this country, I believed that, if a President of the United States made regular appearances as an utterly fact-free monster, it largely would be accidental. That was before 2016, when we discovered that a president* could get elected because he was an utterly fact-free monster. That was before 2016, when we learned that 40 years of a political party's constructing an utterly fact-free monster could be such a successful project.

On Thursday, the president* gave another completely non-political talk on his favorite among the things about which he knows less than nothing: immigration. It was entirely about scaring old white people that MS-13 is coming to dominate the town council and order them all to be eaten to celebrate some foreign holiday—and he, alone, can save them.

Mark Wilson Getty Images

Before we pay this performance the several seconds of attention it deserves, we should note another triumph for local journalism: The Sacramento Bee leaves the president*'s racist cartoon of a campaign ad as a smoking pile of meat in the breakdown lane. This likely will have no impact on anything but it's important to keep a careful historical record in advance of the president*'s going off into the haunted places of his mind again, the way he did Thursday afternoon. This was perhaps the darkest of the many dark corners.

"I will tell you, anybody throwing stones, rocks, like they did to Mexico and the Mexican military, Mexican police, where they badly hurt police and soldiers of Mexico, we will consider that a firearm. They want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. We'll consider — and I told them — consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle."

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a rock is a good guy with an M4 carbine. There are already reports that paramilitaries are gathering down at the border in anticipation of a turkey shoot. I suspect fire control will not be a priority. I suspect the president* doesn't care. He's rooting for a bloodbath.

Monstrous.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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