David Duke: Thank you President Trump. Americans are "Dreamers" too

America's first white supremacist president* hit his applause lines well last night.

Fascist overtones, explicit demonizing of immigrants, calls for increased militarization and policing of our country, this repulsive display by Trump continues.

David Duke, Stormfront and myriad other white supremacists were listening.

The reviews are in:

Thank you President Trump. Americans are "Dreamers" too.

— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) January 31, 2018

Charlie Pierce in Esquire offers words of sanity, commentary that is succor roughly one year before we declare war with Iran.

It was the most elaborate of charades, the most sophisticated of masquerades, that played itself out in the chamber of the House of Representatives on Tuesday night. The amount of pretense required to keep all sensible people—which is to say, any person who was not a Republican—in their chairs must have been heroic.

All involved had to pretend that Donald Trump makes sense as a president, that his administration makes sense as a government, and that his first State of the Union address made sense as either a description of national policy, or as a rhetorical summons to national unity. All involved had to pretend that his thoughts were coherent, that his words made sense, and that the complete and universal collapse of civic responsibility that propelled him onto the podium was not the most singularly destructive event in the history of American democracy since the Civil War. Everyone had to pretend that a freak show was Shakespeare, and that a rumbling, stumbling geek was Lincoln, and that the whole tableau unfolding before the Congress was somehow made noble despite the obvious fact that the whole event was an endless procession of lies and half-truths, and that the only truly remarkable thing about the speech was that it was such a perfectly round and complete crock of shit.

I don’t know how long the institutions of the republic can sustain this much pretense. Over my lifetime, the American presidency has tested what were believed to be the outer limits of counterfeit grandeur, but now we see that there is a vast universe of untruth and malignant fantasy of which we were painfully unaware. It is a burden to maintain the masquerade. It is beyond the strength even of the sturdiest democracy to be led by such a vanguard of unreality. Why anyone showed up on Tuesday night is a mystery to me.

Yes, Trump is happening, right now. Norman Cohn would have been impressed.