Which brings us to the next bit; not only are there no “towns” that have been liberated, but ICE, a border agency, would not be liberating squat to begin with. That is not what they do. It is not even close to what they do, and it is not clear the sitting president even knows what they do. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency enforces border security; it does not conduct military operations to liberate cities. The region most commonly associated with MS-13 violence even in Republican minds is Long Island, New York; ICE does not conduct paramilitary town-liberation efforts on goddamn Long Island. If Trump is referring to the liberation of some non-American town, ICE does not go there. It processes immigrants, refugees, tourists, and the contents of shipping containers. It. Does. Not. Liberate. Towns.

What appears to have happened here is that Donald Trump has taken a Republican talking point–the identification of “MS-13” as the only majority-brown-skinned gang that anybody can think of, now inflated into a racist stand-in for all Latino immigrants everywhere because racism remains the only force capable of uniting Republican voters, and made up a movie in his own head in which not only had they taken over entire (United States?) towns, but were then met by border patrol and customs agents who swept in and “liberated” the town in daring raids.

This is evidence of dementia or other mental illness. It goes beyond his usual egotistical polishing; the man either earnestly believes he has witnessed something nobody else in the world has seen, a story populated by figures that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts in the slightest, or his compulsion to lie is so extraordinary that he cannot help but invent claims.

There is no way to properly emphasize how dangerous it is for the momentary steward of our democracy, commander of our military and holder of our nuclear arsenal to be inventing entire fictional scenarios in his head and then publicly vowing to steer the nation according to those paranoid mental inventions. It is bad enough for any private citizen to exhibit such symptoms–for starters, their family would likely restrict their access to guns, much less intercontinental ballistic missiles–but is quite another for the actual current president to do so. A man who can make such claims publicly is a danger to the office.

This is not an ideological statement. Whether dementia, pathological fiction-inventing, malignant narcissism run amok or something else, a man with a daily habit of inventing fictional worlds in his head is unfit for public office. And yet, once again, the staff members he has surrounded himself with continue to remain silent. Most are die-hard partisans focused on maximizing ideological power; to them, the president’s unfitness for office is irrelevant. They believe they can control him; it seems many in their ranks, from Mike Pence to Steve Miller, count on exploiting the man’s instabilities to push their own sub-agendas. Republicans leadership in the House and Senate have gone to extraordinary lengths to pretend they haven’t seen a stitch of it, or to pretend that their party leader inventing new falsehoods and delusions on an hourly basis is not so far removed from normal political banter that it needs condemning, or even addressing.

It is an unfathomably dangerous wager; Donald Trump is, again, inventing bizarre movie-styled scenarios in his head that nobody else has seen. If the day comes when he declares that his version of “Canada” is in league with international drug smugglers to annex, say, Pennsylvania, what actions will he order the United States to undertake to stop it? He is already putting refugees into camps under the pretense of MS-13 something something–again, a scenario with little to no bearing on the real world. We cannot say, and we must expect, that other conspiracy-rich inventions of his mind will result in further carve-outs to our security, stability, and decency itself.

At some point there is going to come a day, presuming the man is not otherwise done in by the rampant criminal corruption investigators keep finding when they so much as brush up against one of his top business or campaign lieutenants, when the man’s instabilities will be impossible to ignore. He may have to be carted out of the office sedated and in a wagon with padded walls. When that day comes, every one of the denizens of this White House will appear before the cameras and pipe up that there was nothing they could do, there was no opportunity for them to speak out, and demand that the American public re-hire and trust them once again so that they can continue their merry little careers and put this whole episode behind them.

No. Good God, no. We cannot trust any of these over-ambitious cretins with so much as ownership of a juice bar ever again. Their efforts to enable a genuine lunatic and imbecile should haunt them to their graves.