The mystery tax cut is only the latest instance of the federal government scrambling to reverse engineer policies to meet Trump’s sudden public promises—or to search for evidence buttressing his conspiracy theories and falsehoods.

Another prime example, which also unfolded this week, involves President Twitter’s claims that “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” to groups of Central Americans crossing the border between Mexico and the U.S. Did he have any proof? Of course not! Nevertheless, by the end of the day, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was telling reporters that the president “absolutely“ had evidence to support his claim, citing a statistic of dubious origins that every day 10 suspected or known terrorists attempt to enter the U.S. illegally, which of course wasn’t even the original lie. Mike Pence played along, too, claiming during a Washington Post event Tuesday that “there are statistics on this,” and that “it’s inconceivable that there are not people of Middle Eastern descent in a crowd of more than 7,000 people advancing toward our border . . . In the last fiscal year, we apprehended more than 10 terrorists or suspected terrorists per day at our southern border from countries that are referred to in the lexicon as ‘other than Mexico.’ That means from the Middle East region.” Shortly thereafter, Trump threw both Pence and Sanders under the bus, telling reporters in the Oval Office, “There’s no proof of anything. But there could very well be.”

The president’s declaration that the Pentagon would be creating a “Space Force” (news to the Pentagon at the time), and his threat to impose auto tariffs, likewise sent his staff scrambling to implement retroactive plans: Pence himself has since been tasked with overseeing said force, and a plan for the tariffs subsequently materialized at the Commerce Department. And of course, there’s the all-time classic: the formal commission that was formed on the basis of Trump’s completely groundless claim that he only lost the popular vote in 2016 due to widespread voter fraud. (The panel was eventually disbanded.) “Virtually no one on the planet has the kind of power that a president of the United States has to scramble bureaucracies in the service of whim,” Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, told the Post. “Whatever Donald Trump wakes up and thinks about, or whatever comes to mind in the middle of a speech, actually has the reality in that it is actionable in some odd sense.”

Moreover, at least some of Trump’s staffers are fully aware that they’re bullshitting the American people—they just don’t seem to care. “It doesn’t matter if it’s 100 percent accurate,” a senior Trump administration official told the Daily Beast of the president’s immigration fear-mongering. “This is the play.”

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