In the long list of casually monstrous things that Donald Trump has said online and off during his tenure as 45th president of the United States, his Thursday morning refusal to acknowledge the death toll in Puerto Rico post-Maria is worthy of a special kind of hatred. Days away from the one-year anniversary of one of the nation's most devastating natural disasters, Donald Trump saw fit to say that the nearly 3,000 dead Puerto Ricans were a work of fiction, a conspiracy cooked up by Democrats to make him look bad.

There are times when the polite, dispassionate language of political discourse and reporting fails humanity. It is not merely a "baseless claim" to insist that thousands of dead people did not die. It is not merely "a conspiracy theory" to say that a natural disaster that ended numerous lives—an unnecessarily high toll that you are responsible for—is a story made up by political opponents. Uttering such words at the funeral for one of these victims wouldn't just be incomprehensible but monstrous. And yet the president of the United States of America sees fit to broadcast them from the highest office in the land. Elected officials continue to turn a blind eye. And the political press does what it always does: take quotes, note their impropriety, and carry on, satisfied to have done their duty as Donald Trump dances on the graves of thousands of brown people. To the stalwart members of the White House press corps, it's just another day in Crazytown, U.S.A.

From Maria's formation until this very day, the United States government has failed to acknowledge or adequately act to protect the lives of its own citizens. Congress has taken no meaningful action, and the politics arm of media's old guard, unable to break free of the only dance they know, merely seem interested in scoring points. Meanwhile, Paul Ryan and other Republican lawmakers are quick to point out that they don't share the president's dispute of the death toll, while offering no explanation why they've done nothing about, say, the thousands of water bottles left forgotten on a runway until reporters noticed them this week, too contaminated now to be any good for anyone.

These are all easy points to make, injustices enacted with a level of indifference that only begins to make sense if you start with the supposition that the United States government, and those who report on it, only really move their asses to help and understand people in need when those people are white, English-speaking citizens. In America, brown life is cheap. And it's getting cheaper all the time.