This week U.S. president and butterscotch felt doll Donald Trump announced that he was sending out ICE once more to round up and deport as many illegal immigrants as they could get their belligerent mitts on—“millions” according to Trump’s razor-sharp mental math. This is the crowning blow of a long-gestating Stephen Miller masterplan so nasty and cruel that even Kirstjen Nielsen couldn’t get on board with it. ICE chief Mark Morgan, a self-styled racialist precog who once said he could tell if an immigrant minor would join MS-13 simply by looking into their eyes, said the plan includes arresting whole families, but “with compassion and humanity.”

If you know anything about ICE’s methods and their ongoing family separation efforts, you know that Morgan is lying, and you know that he knows that you know he’s lying. Compassion gets you suspended from ICE without pay.

If this makes you furious, that is by design. Trump ascended to the presidency thanks to a number of factors—voter suppression, voter anger, sexism, white resentment, colossal strategic missteps by his opponent, an electoral college system radically skewed in his party’s favor, those naughty Russians—but his most consistently effective trait throughout that campaign, and his presidency as a whole, has been his boundless desire and ability to anger the opposition.

That is the primary reason Republicans have fallen under his sway. It's how he found a toehold within that party to begin with. Republicans are champions of misery and they have been since long before Trump started running. Bereft of real ideas, and ever obedient to their corporate interests, Republicans in this century have centered their overarching political philosophy around trolling anyone who dare oppose them, and then doing nothing else. It's their brand now.

You could argue this started with Sarah Palin back when now-deceased Trump foil John McCain tapped her as his running mate in 2008 (it’s actually incredible that Palin hasn’t been able to make hay in a 2019 political climate that so perfectly suits her cornpone inadequacy). But no matter when it began, it has flourished to the point where Stoneman Douglas High troll Kyle Kashuv can get his Harvard admission rescinded and immediately seize upon the occasion as a potentially lucrative opportunity to martyr himself for the wingnut cause. He almost certainly already knew he could count the prevailing conservative media apparatus to support him in that endeavor, and lo and behold, they quickly obliged. Who's crazy now?

Kashuv is hardly alone in making entreaties to a right-wing cottage industry of powerful people routinely complaining about outside forces depriving them of the power they still have, and where the ability to “trigger” people is seen as the highest virtue of all. Trump has made his thin skin a given, but he and his ilk demand thick skin of others, and the media is more than happy to capitulate.

Does that piss you off? PERFECT. Again, that’s the end goal. The only goal, really. Trump loves to say his opponents are “going crazy,” and his underlings have followed suit by making “Trump Derangement Syndrome” their preferred diagnosis for people who would prefer that immigrant children not be confined to concentration camps (OH NOES DON'T CALL THEM THAT, THAT'S MEAN!) and left to rot. Are you crazy for being angered by these crimes? You are not. It doesn’t matter. This seemingly counterintuitive political instinct has worked wonders for the GOP, to the point where Mitch McConnell—who is a stain on American history but also a canny operative—can callously dismiss lapsed payments to 9/11 first responders as NBD and appear utterly unconcerned about receiving significant blowback to his indifference. You and Jon Stewart are just being hysterical. Pissing you off and making you miserable, even if you’re a 9/11 survivor, is the objective. Complaining about it to McConnell only proves to him, in his own mind, that he is doing his job correctly.