“Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing Illegal Immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only […] The Radical Left always seem to have an Open Borders, Open Arms policy – so this should make them very happy!” If the primitive sentence structure or specious reasoning did not clue you in to the authorship of this statement, then the obstinate, callous inhumanity should. U.S. President Donald Trump has once again made a policy prescription as cruel as it is ahistorical. A central target of his ire this week has been so-called “sanctuary cities,” among them Los Angeles, New York, Hartford, and others, who either implicitly or expressly in law state an intention to limit cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the detention of refugees. The President has taken significant action to oppose the practice since his election, going so far as to issue an executive order in 2017 stating that municipalities that contravene 8 U.S.C. 1373 (a section of U.S. law prohibiting local or state governments from impeding information flow to Immigration and Naturalization Service) would become ineligible to receive federal funding.

It can hardly be called unusual for Trump to engage in these sorts of shameless, bizarre political exploits; his unique and totally soulless brand of incompetence works as a sort of perpetual motion machine, churning out paradoxical policies that are at once crypto-fascist and entirely anarchic. But there is something particularly special about this plan, some corn of resentful, envious Nazism that grew to fruition within the stuffy halls of the Trump White House. The President is proposing, in effect, that immigrant ghettos be established within primarily Democrat-controlled sanctuary cities. It is unclear whether it was Trump’s actual intention to model the wickedness of 1930’s Germany, or if he is truly so historically uninformed as to simply recreate this behavior entirely on his own. An official with the Department of Homeland Security had an especially ominous sound-byte to contribute about the White House’s designs, claiming that the proposal “was retaliation, to show [Dems], ‘Your lack of cooperation has impacts.’”

The plan is even more odious when one attempts to observe it from Trump’s stinted, racist point of view; he believes that immigrants on the whole commit crime at much higher rates and are far more prone to profligacy, free-riding, and violence than the average U.S. citizen – which they are not. But if they were, it would imply that Trump was utilizing them as a means of fomenting violence and discord almost exclusively within Democrat-controlled districts, immiserating and jeopardizing the lives of scores of his own citizens in order to force the Democratic establishment to abandon policies he does not like. Thus the President has violated even the most basic requirements of a public servant, “ensuring the beneficence of the State and its citizens,” in pursuit of smug political points for an unconscionably stupid border wall. Trump as an individual – and the modern Republican Party so unwilling to oppose his cruel platform – is well beyond saving. The question now is whether the United States will be able to overcome this especially brutish, inhuman period intact, if at all.