It seems like just yesterday that we were saying, contrary to the image inserted into the public consciousness by SNL, that Eric Trump might actually be the smart one. Ah, it was yesterday. The time dilation of our peculiar historical moment keeps spinning away, and so, too, do the various offspring and associates of our ruling family. The Other Brother took to the hallowed ground of political discourse known as Fox & Friends this Thursday morning, and his appearance illustrated an essential element of the Fox News experience.

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LOL -- Eric Trump accuses the Obama administration of having "more integrity problems than any administration," and cites "the IRS, you know, spying on conservatives." pic.twitter.com/c5n0BEjknE — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) March 7, 2019

There's a whole belief system of half-truths and full-on conspiracies that have been flogged for so long on these airwaves that they've simply been accepted as reality. This is the source of the vertigo you experience every time Trump emerges from the infotainment vortex he dunks his head in for four-to-eight hours a day. Nobody summarized the phenomenon better than Jason Gilbert:

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You know something bad happened in the Russia investigation when Trump tweets a list of right-wing scandals you’ve never heard of: “Remember Peter Q, Berlin Meeting, James Clapper’s voicemail, Uranium Helicopter, Qatari Meatball Fight!" — Jason O. Gilbert (@gilbertjasono) January 12, 2019

In this instance, Eric Trump says off-handedly that under President Obama, the IRS "spied" on conservatives. This is outlandishly false, but he's drawing on an ancient conservative outrage meme. It's true that in 2013, the IRS was caught using certain keywords, like “Tea Party" or "patriot," to identify groups that might deserve further scrutiny. This was a bad approach to criteria, but the underlying mission was sound.

Since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision flooded our political system with money in 2010, there was a surge in applications to set up charitable organizations known as 501(c)4s to accept big money from donors. (IRS officials said they used the keywords because of the sheer volume of requests they had to sort through.) By law, these groups don't have to report their donors so long as politics isn't their main mission, so they often cast themselves as "social welfare" organizations. But they're often directly affiliated with a Super PAC that they shovel money towards. (See: Karl Rove's "American Crossroads," a Super PAC, and "Crossroads GPS," a charity.) They are, in fact, political groups. This is the "dark money" you might have heard about.

The Trump Clan attends the 2019 State of the Union address. In the contest to survive this mess, Tiffany, on the far-right, is the leader in the clubhouse. MANDEL NGAN Getty Images

What the IRS sought to do at the time was determine whether these groups were actually abusing the tax code—that is, federal law—to get around whatever was left of our campaign finance laws after Justice Anthony Kennedy shredded them with Citizens United. But of course, conservatives seized on the initial revelations as proof that the Obama administration was using the agency as a weapon against his political opponents. (How quaint in this new era of "Lock Her Up!") They forced out the IRS commissioner and harped on the issue so much on talk radio and Fox News—think approximately 55 percent of a Benghazi—that it became Conservative Canon. Never mind that we later learned the IRS was also using keywords to scrutinize liberal groups to see if they were committing the same abuses of the tax code. Too late! It's canon.

There's an embedded dogma in mainstream conservative media which forms the skeleton of its ideological programming. It does not rise to the level of an InfoWars, where the legally embattled Alex Jones rattles off the most insane conspiracy theories you'll ever hear with minimal explanation because anyone listening is expected to be deeply brain-infected. But there is a set of beliefs on Fox News that have taken hold as an entire alternate infrastructure of reality. They mutate and grow over time, steadily drifting away from the empirical world. That's how you sometimes find the president ranting and raving about "FBI Lovers Strzok and Page" and throwing out still-more-obscure references like they're household names. He's so deep in the bubble he can't see where it ends—which, of course, is a phenomenal place for the world's most powerful man to be.

There was some other Eric news today, however.

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Juan Quintero, living in the U.S. illegally, personally texted with Eric Trump about his work at the Trump sons' hunting lodge. When he couldn't produce a social security number to get an ATM card, he was given an ATM card to use in someone else's name. https://t.co/8lMJ7xsa04 — Rosalind Helderman (@PostRoz) March 6, 2019

Never forget that these people don't give a single fuck about illegal immigration. None. The president has always hired undocumented people, maybe because they are far easier to exploit with rock-bottom wages and zero worker protections. He doesn't care. His sons had undocumented folks run their hunting retreat. They don't care. They've never suggested punishing employers for hiring people without papers, because they are those employers and so are their cronies. They just know peddling anti-immigrant resentment is good politics. Where could they have learned that?

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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