For a group that’s positively apoplectic over President Obama’s relatively small number of executive orders, Republican primary voters seem awfully keen on certain types of executive order.

Which is why Donald Trump can say, to thunderous applause, that if he’s elected president he will issue an executive order mandating the death penalty for anyone who shoots and kills a police officer.

Trump made the proposal while receiving the endorsement of the New England Police Benevolent Association, a union that represents police and correctional officers.

As the New York Times was quick to point out in their fact check of Trump’s proposal this morning, “that is not how America’s legal system works.” Not only did the Supreme Court outlaw automatic death sentences in 1976, but the President doesn’t have authority over state-level sentencing laws. And nearly 20 states do not have the death penalty as an available sentence for any crime.

But of course, that isn’t the point. None of Trump’s policy proposals are designed to reflect political reality. Even the American Nazi Party has dismissed Trump’s call for banning Muslim entry into the United States as unrealistic, telling Buzzfeed in an email that “Unless Trump plans on ruling by Presidential Decree, I don’t see how he would implement ANY of his ‘plans,’ the rest of the sold out ‘mainstream’ political whores would block his every move.”

Granted, “ruling by Presidential Decree” isn’t too far off from what conservatives think Obama’s been doing with his use of executive power, and is precisely what Trump has promised to do with respect to the death penalty for cop-killers, but you get the point.

There are a number of reasons why Trump can get away with proposing out-and-out fantasies as public policy while making claim after claim that is, as philosopher Harry Frankfurt would politely put it, “not germane to the enterprise of describing reality.” One of those reasons is that Trump’s supporters really are different from the rest of the GOP field’s. They are less educated, they are less familiar with the political process and as one might imagine, they are more likely to have watched The Apprentice. This means that when Donald Trump says that he can do things that no politician has ever done before — that no politician would ever dream of doing — and he can make it happen with nothing more than “leadership” and “management,” it doesn’t sound quite as nuts to his audience as it would if Marco Rubio said something similar to his.

This means that Trump can pitch his presidency as the de-facto equivalent of what would happen if Breitbart asked its commenters what they would do if they each got to be king for a day. Congress is less of a check on Trump’s power so much as it is a hurdle to step over: As not-exactly-fringe elements within the Republican Party have been saying since 2011, the only thing keeping congressional Democrats from adopting every conservative principle is the GOP’s insufficient thirst for a fight and lack of competence in the three-dimensional chess match that is Washington politics. Trump offers quick and easy solutions for both of those grievances. As for the Supreme Court? According to Trump, some “top lawyers” have said that the Constitution itself is unconstitutional, so all bets really are off there.

All this is to say that fact checking Donald Trump when he proposes outlandish, illegal and abundantly cruel ideas may be necessary, but let’s not pretend facts matter to the people who support him.