When Trump tweets, the press must respond, and The New York Times and The Washington Post and everyone else began to release their “um, actually” articles. Um, actually, Trump is wrong to tie DACA to this. Um, actually, a study by the three Yale sociologists shows that . . . etc. As always, these responses tended to go after Trump’s mangled details while amplifying his overall message. It was technically true, observed FactCheck, that some families that make it to the border and ask for asylum effectively have to be released into the United States after a few days, with hundreds of thousands of them settling down and many ignoring summonses to appear in court later. “But”—regarding such laws—“it’s a stretch to blame those entirely on Democrats.” And so on.

Trump continued to tweet angrily, seeming, as usual, to forget that he occupies the Oval Office and that stamping one’s foot on Twitter and asking to be protected from migrants might give something contrary to an impression of strength. Some scratched their heads over Trump’s continued inability to capitalize on any of this. If it were a real crisis, why not call a special session of Congress? But Trump stuck to Twitter and tried to escalate. “Cash cow NAFTA is in play, as is foreign aid to Honduras and the countries that allow this to happen,” he tweeted.

Joining the chorus now were thousands of Trump fans weighing in with suggestions of their own, many of which could be reviewed by anyone searching on Twitter for “caravan” and “shoot.” For instance, “SHOOT TO FUKIN KILL!!”, read a tweet from “Billy,” with the handle @deplorable_dawg.

By this time, in a curious show of defiance, news outlets started to put caravan in quotation marks, deeming it a “caravan” or a “so-called ‘caravan’” and suggesting it was nothing out of the ordinary. The New York Times headline writers dutifully characterized the marchers as “Huddled Masses,” the chanting and drumming and border-agent ousters notwithstanding. Times correspondent Kirk Semple explained that the mass migrations had been an annual event for five years, going “virtually unnoticed north of the border with the United States” until tweets from Trump “suddenly turned the latest caravan into a major international incident.” So there. T.P.M.’s Josh Marshall, echoing much of liberal Twitter, dismissed the episode as “an election gambit to try to energize Trump voters with a phony crisis,” although he neglected to explain how Trump had gotten BuzzFeed to run a sensational headline.

At this point, Trump decided the National Guard should be deployed to help secure the border. “Trump shows us how it’s done,” tweeted reformed ex-con Dinesh D’Souza, as if the National Guard were permitted to do anything more than serve as extra eyes, build roads, or help with administrative tasks. Meanwhile, Resistance Twitter crowned a new hero in the form of Oregon Governor Kate Brown—who seized the spotlight to proclaim that she’d refuse to deploy the state’s National Guard, perhaps out of worry that the border might suddenly move 1,000 miles north—and erupted in alarm over alleged border militarization and Trumpian threats to democracy, seemingly unaware that Barack Obama and many other presidents had also sent National Guard troops to the border.