The President of the United States is not fit to hold the office. Every day the Republican majorities in Congress and his infotainment apparatchiks at Fox News prop him up is another day of disgrace for the nation. The president does not care what happens to most anyone, a function of what is one of the clearest cases of malignant narcissism—bordering on what's been called "radical solipsism"—ever seen in a public official. But he particularly does not care what happens to black and brown people, whom he thinks are, at best, hangers-on to the American experience and should just be happy they're allowed to stay.

Never has this been more readily, gobsmackingly apparent than in his handling of Hurricane Maria's devastation of Puerto Rico, which is an American territory where Americans live. In the initial aftermath, Trump dragged his feet on going to the island. He explained the response was difficult because the island was surrounded by "big water." When he arrived, having spent previous days fighting with the mayor of San Juan on the Internet, he announced that Maria was not "a real catastrophe" and told people to "have a good time." He "joked" that the island—at least 90 percent of which was without power at the time, and where food and clean water were in short supply—was ruining his administration's budget. Then he started jump shooting paper towels into a crowd of hurricane survivors.

Recently, it was confirmed that nearly 3,000 human beings—or, if it matters more to you, American human beings—died as a result of the storm and, it increasingly appears, the government's poor response to it. Here is how Donald Trump, American president, handled the news that significantly more people died in Maria than in Hurricane Katrina:

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3000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico. When I left the Island, AFTER the storm had hit, they had anywhere from 6 to 18 deaths. As time went by it did not go up by much. Then, a long time later, they started to report really large numbers, like 3000... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

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.....This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico. If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list. Bad politics. I love Puerto Rico! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 13, 2018

Imagine you lost a family member in a natural disaster and the President of the United States not only displayed his typically blunt indifference, but also suggested their death was faked as part of a hoax by his political opponents. Imagine he lied while doing it, making up conspiracies about how the deaths were counted. (The figures have been certified by both the Puerto Rican government and independent researchers.) Imagine he tried to erase you and your family for his own political gain.

As reporter Daniel Dale is chronicling, Trump has lied constantly about Puerto Rico from the start to make himself and his administration's response look better. That's because the world outside is irrelevant to him—the solipsism at work. He honestly believes reality can be bent to his own ends, that facts can be erased or magicked out of thin air as it suits him, that the truth is whatever enough people will believe. This is not a recipe for competent leadership, and it's not one for moral literacy.

After all, if the president can erase people's lives out of convenience, he cannot possibly value those lives. He is not making decisions that factor in the moral gravity of their existence. He doesn't care about them. He is not fit for the office, he cannot do the job, and every one of his spineless, disgraceful allies knows it.

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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