By now you've probably heard that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has released his first television ad, one parroting Trump's race-baiting warnings about the scary brown menace coming for us all, and that it features grainy colorless footage of immigrants streaming across "our southern border" that turns out to actually be refugees fleeing from Morocco to the North African Spanish city of Melilla, an entire Atlantic Ocean away from "our southern border" and not really the same thing at all.
This obliged fact-checkers to once again point out the Trump campaign's ongoing crookedness. The Trump campaign is, however, unimpressed with the facts.
Which makes perfect sense. Donald Trump began his campaign with a claim that Mexico was "sending us" their "rapists"; it only makes sense to illustrate Trump's fictional version of the border with fictional videotape purporting to show what Trump believes our "dumping ground is going to look like."
The argument that it's perfectly valid because the footage is merely meant to show what could happen if Candidate A does not win his election is, though, itself egregiously silly. You can use it for anything, if you put your mind to it; if our candidate fails to win his election, schoolchildren will be forced to eat one another for sustenance; if our candidate does not at least make the top three in Iowa, subterranean gorillas will crawl out of the storm drains and end up on your front porch. Naturally, the people surrounding Donald Trump are obliged to parrot his arguments even when his arguments are nonsensical. That is how you collect a paycheck in the Donald Trump universe.
As for Trump lawyer Michael Cohen, he perhaps slipped when he called the move a "mistake" in a CNN interview, and he quickly walked it back after talking to the campaign. But even when he thought it was a "mistake" he was quick to pooh-pooh the notion that using random footage of Not The Border to illustrate Trump's border claims amounted to a significant error.
"So what? What's the difference?"
There ya go, sport. It's not like the average Trump supporter could find Morocco on a map, after all.
I wonder if any of these people will, a year or two from now, look back and be profoundly embarrassed by the things they did on behalf of Donald Trump. Probably not. If you agree to work for Donald Trump, you probably have already gone well past the point of being able to feel shame.