On a wind-swept, frigid night in February 2009, a 37-year-old schoolteacher named Scott Nailor parked his rusted '92 Toyota Tercel in the parking lot of a Fireside Inn in Auburn, Maine. He picked this spot to have a final reckoning with himself. He was going to end his life.

Beaten down after more than a decade of struggle with student debt, after years of taking false doors and slipping into various puddles of bureaucratic quicksand, he was giving up the fight. "This is it, I'm done," he remembers thinking. "I sat there and just sort of felt like I'm going to take my life. I'm going to find a way to park this car in the garage, with it running or whatever."

Nailor's problems began at 19 years old, when he borrowed for tuition so that he could pursue a bachelor's degree at the University of Southern Maine. He graduated summa cum laude four years later and immediately got a job in his field, as an English teacher.

But he graduated with $35,000 in debt, a big hill to climb on a part-time teacher's $18,000 salary. He struggled with payments, and he and his wife then consolidated their student debt, which soon totaled more than $50,000. They declared bankruptcy and defaulted on the loans. From there he found himself in a loan "rehabilitation" program that added to his overall balance. "That's when the noose began to tighten," he says.

The collectors called day and night, at work and at home. "In the middle of class too, while I was teaching," he says. He ended up in another rehabilitation program that put him on a road toward an essentially endless cycle of rising payments. Today, he pays $471 a month toward "rehabilitation," and, like countless other borrowers, he pays nothing at all toward his real debt, which he now calculates would cost more than $100,000 to extinguish. "Not one dollar of it goes to principal," says Nailor. "I will never be able to pay it off. My only hope to escape from this crushing debt is to die."

After repeated phone calls with lending agencies about his ever-rising interest payments, Nailor now believes things will only get worse with time. "At this rate, I may easily break $1 million in debt before I retire from teaching," he says.

Nailor had more than once reached the stage in his thoughts where he was thinking about how to physically pull off his suicide. "I'd been there before, that just was the worst of it," he says. "It scared me, bad."

He had a young son and a younger daughter, but Nailor had been so broken by the experience of financial failure that he managed to convince himself they would be better off without him. What saved him is that he called his wife to say goodbye. "I don't know why I called my wife. I'm glad I did," he says. "I just wanted her or someone to tell me to pick it up, keep fighting, it's going to be all right. And she did."

From that moment, Nailor managed to focus on his family. Still, the core problem - the spiraling debt that has taken over his life, as it has for millions of other Americans - remains.

Horror stories about student debt are nothing new. But this school year marks a considerable worsening of a tale that ought to have been a national emergency years ago. The government in charge of regulating this mess is now filled with predatory monsters who have extensive ties to the exploitative for-profit education industry - from Donald Trump himself to Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, who sets much of the federal loan policy, to Julian Schmoke, onetime dean of the infamous DeVry University, whom Trump appointed to police fraud in education.

Americans don't understand the student-loan crisis because they've been trained to view the issue in terms of a series of separate, unrelated problems. They will read in one place that as of the summer of 2017, a record 8.5 million Americans are in default on their student debt, with about $1.3 trillion in loans still outstanding.

In another place, voters will read that the cost of higher education is skyrocketing, soaring in a seemingly market-defying arc that for nearly a decade now has run almost double the rate of inflation. Tuition for a halfway decent school now frequently surpasses $50,000 a year. How, the average newsreader wonders, can any child not born in a yacht afford to go to school these days?

In a third place, that same reader will see some heartless monster, usually a Republican, threatening to cut federal student lending. The current bogeyman is Trump, who is threatening to slash the Pell Grant program by $3.9 billion, which would seem to put higher education even further out of reach for poor and middle-income families. This too seems appalling, and triggers a different kind of response, encouraging progressive voters to lobby for increased availability for educational lending.

But the separateness of these stories clouds the unifying issue underneath: The education industry as a whole is a con. In fact, since the mortgage business blew up in 2008, education and student debt is probably our reigning unexposed nation-wide scam.

It's a multiparty affair, what shakedown artists call a "big store scheme," like in the movie The Sting: a complex deception requiring a big cast to string the mark along every step of the way. In higher education, every party you meet, from the moment you first set foot on campus, is in on the game.

America as a country has evolved in recent decades into a confederacy of widescale industrial scams. The biggest slices of our economic pie - sectors like health care, military production, banking, even commercial and residential real estate - have become crude income-redistribution schemes, often untethered from the market by subsidies or bailouts, with the richest companies benefiting from gamed or denuded regulatory systems that make profits almost as assured as taxes. Guaranteed-profit scams - that's the last thing America makes with any level of consistent competence. In that light, Trump, among other things, the former head of a schlock diploma mill called Trump University, is a perfect president for these times. He's the scammer-in-chief in the Great American Ripoff Age, a time in which fleecing students is one of our signature achievements.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvane

It starts with the sales pitch colleges make to kids. The thrust of it is usually that people who go to college make lots more money than the unfortunate dunces who don't. "A bachelor's degree is worth $2.8 million on average over a lifetime" is how Georgetown University put it. The Census Bureau tells us similarly that a master's degree is worth on average about $1.3 million more than a high school diploma.

But these stats say more about the increasing uselessness of a high school degree than they do about the value of a college diploma. Moreover, since virtually everyone at the very highest strata of society has a college degree, the stats are skewed by a handful of financial titans. A college degree has become a minimal status marker as much as anything else. "I'm sure people who take polo lessons or sailing lessons earn a lot more on average too," says Alan Collinge of Student Loan Justice, which advocates for debt forgiveness and other reforms. "Does that mean you should send your kids to sailing school?"

But the pitch works on everyone these days, especially since good jobs for Trump's beloved "poorly educated" are scarce to nonexistent. Going to college doesn't guarantee a good job, far from it, but the data show that not going dooms most young people to an increasingly shallow pool of the very crappiest, lowest-paying jobs. There's a lot of stick, but not much carrot, in the education game.

It's a vicious cycle. Since everyone feels obligated to go to college, most everyone who can go, does, creating a glut of graduates. And as that glut of degree recipients grows, the squeeze on the un-degreed grows tighter, increasing further that original negative incentive: Don't go to college, and you'll be standing on soup lines by age 25.

With that inducement in place, colleges can charge almost any amount, and kids will pay - so long as they can get the money. And here we run into problem number two: It's too easy to find that money.

Parents, not wanting their kids to fall behind, will pay every dollar they have. But if they don't have the cash, there is a virtually unlimited amount of credit available to young people. Proposed cuts to Pell Grants aside, the landscape is filled with public and private lending, and students gobble it up. Kids who walk into financial-aid offices are often not told what signing their names on the various aid forms will mean down the line. A lot of kids don't even understand the concept of interest or amortization tables - they think if they're borrowing $8,000, they're paying back $8,000.

Nailor certainly was unaware of what he was getting into when he was 19. "I had no idea [about interest]," he says. "I just remember thinking, 'I don't have to worry about it right now. I want to go to school.'" He pauses in disgust. "It's unsettling to remember how it was like, 'Here, just sign this and you're all set.' I wish I could take the time machine back and slap myself in the face."

The average amount of debt for a student leaving school is skyrocketing even faster than the rate of tuition increase. In 2016, for instance, the average amount of debt for an exiting college graduate was a staggering $37,172. That's a rise of six percent over just the previous year. With the average undergraduate interest rate at about 3.7 percent, the interest alone costs around $115 per month, meaning anyone who can't afford to pay into the principal faces the prospect of $69,000 in payments over 50 years.

So here's the con so far. You must go to college because you're screwed if you don't. Costs are outrageously high, but you pay them because you have to, and because the system makes it easy to borrow massive amounts of money. The third part of the con is the worst: You can't get out of the debt. Since government lenders in particular have virtually unlimited power to collect on student debt - preying on everything from salary to income-tax returns - even running is not an option. And since most young people find themselves unable to make their full payments early on, they often find themselves perpetually paying down interest only, never touching the principal. Our billionaire president can declare bankruptcy four times, but students are the one class of citizen that may not do it even once.

An Occupy Wall Street protester in April 2012

October 2017 was supposed to represent the first glimmer of light at the end of this tunnel. This month marks the 10th anniversary of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, one of the few avenues for wiping out student debt. The idea, launched by George W. Bush, was pretty simple: Students could pledge to work 10 years for the government or a nonprofit and have their debt forgiven. In order to qualify, borrowers had to make payments for 10 years using a complex formula. This month, then, was to start the first mass wipeouts of debt in the history of American student lending. But more than half of the 700,000 enrollees have already been expunged from the program for, among other things, failing to certify their incomes on time, one of many bureaucratic tricks employed to limit forgiveness eligibility. To date, fewer than 500 participants are scheduled to receive loan forgiveness in this first round.

Moreover, Trump has called for the program's elimination by 2018, meaning that any relief that begins this month is likely only temporary. The only thing that is guaranteed to remain real for the immediate future are the massive profits being generated on the backs of young people, who before long become old people who, all too often, remain ensnared until their last days in one of the country's most brilliant and devious moneymaking schemes.

Everybody wins in this madness, except students. Even though many of the loans are originated by the state, most of them are serviced by private or quasi-private companies like Navient - which until 2014 was the student-loan arm of Sallie Mae - or Nelnet, companies that reported a combined profit of around $1 billion last year (the U.S. government made a profit of $1.6 billion in 2016!). Debt-collector companies like Performant (which generated $141.4 million in revenues; the family of Betsy DeVos is a major investor), and most particularly the colleges and universities, get to prey on the desperation and terror of parents and young people, and in the process rake in vast sums virtually without fear of market consequence.

About that: Universities, especially public institutions, have successfully defended rising tuition in recent years by blaming the hikes on reduced support from states. But this explanation was blown to bits in large part due to a bizarre slip-up in the middle of a controversy over state support of the University of Wisconsin system a few years ago.

In that incident, UW raised tuition by 5.5 percent six years in a row after 2007. The school blamed stresses from the financial crisis and decreased state aid. But when pressed during a state committee hearing in 2013 about the university's finances, UW system president Kevin Reilly admitted they held $648 million in reserve, including $414 million in tuition payments. This was excess hidey-hole cash the school was sitting on, separate and distinct from, say, an endowment fund.

After the university was showered with criticism for hoarding cash at a time when it was gouging students with huge price increases every year, the school responded by saying, essentially, it only did what all the other kids were doing. UW released data showing that other major state-school systems across the country were similarly stashing huge amounts of cash. While Wisconsin's surplus was only 25 percent of its operating budget, for instance, Minnesota's was 29 percent, and Illinois maintained a whopping 34 percent reserve.

When Collinge, of Student Loan Justice, looked into it, he found that the phenomenon wasn't confined to state schools. Private schools, too, have been hoarding cash even as they plead poverty and jack up tuition fees. "They're all doing it," he says.

While universities sit on their stockpiles of cash and the loan industry generates record profits, the pain of living in debilitating debt for many lasts into retirement. Take Veronica Martish. She's a 68-year-old veteran, having served in the armed forces in the Vietnam era. She's also a grandmother who's never been in trouble and consid
ers herself a patriot. "The thing is, I tried to do everything right in my life. But this ruined my life."

This is an $8,000 student loan she took out in 1989, through Sallie Mae. She borrowed the money so she could take courses at Quinebaug Valley Community College in Connecticut. Five years later, after deaths in her family, she fell behind on her payments and entered a loan-rehabilitation program. "That's when my nightmare began," she says.

In rehabilitation, Martish's $8,000 loan, with fees and interest, ballooned into a $27,000 debt, which she has been carrying ever since. She says she's paid more than $63,000 to date and is nowhere near discharging the principal. "By the time I die," she says, "I will probably pay more than $200,000 toward an $8,000 loan. It's a scam, you see. Nothing ever comes off the loan. It's all interest and fees. And they chase you until you're old, like me. They never stop. Ever."

And that's the other thing about lending to students: It's the safest grift around.
(c) 2017 Matt Taibbi is Rolling Stone's chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

I HATE self-evident truths.

Ideals may be self-evident. Political statements are not. When I hear about a self-evident political truth, I immediately doubt it.

The most self-evident political truth at this moment concerns Iran. Iran is our deadly enemy. Iran wants to destroy us. We must destroy its capabilities first.

Since this is self-evident, the anti-nuclear agreement signed between Iran and the five Security Council members (plus Germany) is terrible. Just terrible. We should have ordered the Americans long ago to bomb Iran to smithereens. In the unlikely event that they would have disobeyed us, we should have nuclear-bombed Iran ourselves, before their crazy fanatical leaders have the opportunity to annihilate us first.

All these are self-evident truths. To my mind, all of them are utter nonsense. There is nothing self-evident about them. Indeed, they have no logical basis at all. They lack any geopolitical, historical or factual foundation.

NAPOLEON ONCE said that if one wants to understand the behavior of a country, one has to look at the map.

Geography is more important than ideology, however fanatical. Ideologies change with time. Geography doesn't. The most fanatically ideological country in the 20th century was the Soviet Union. It abhorred its predecessor, Czarist Russia. It would have abhorred its successor, Putin's Russia. But lo and behold - the Czars, Stalin and Putin conduct more or less the same foreign policy. Karl Marx must be turning in his grave.

When the Biblical Israelite people was born, Persia was already a civilized country. King Cyrus of Persia sent the "Jews" to Jerusalem and founded what can be called the "Jewish people." He is remembered in Jewish history as a great benefactor.

When the State of Israel was founded in 1948, David Ben-Gurion saw in Iran a natural ally. It may now sound strange, but not so long ago Iran was indeed the most pro-Israeli country in the Middle East.

Ben-Gurion was an out-and-out realist. Since he had no intention whatsoever to make peace with the Arabs, a peace which would have prevented the original small State of Israel expanding without boundaries, he looked for allies beyond the Arab world.

Looking at the map (yes, he believed in the map) he saw that the Muslim Arabs were surrounded by a number of non-Arab or non-Muslim entities. There were the Maronite Christians in Lebanon (not Muslims), the Turks (Muslims, but not Arabs), the Kurds (Muslims but not Arabs), Iran (Muslim, but not Arab), Ethiopia (neither Muslim nor Arab) and more.

Seeing this, Ben-Gurion devised a grand plan: a "partnership of the periphery", an alliance of all these entities surrounding the Arab world and which felt threatened by the emerging pan-Arab nationalism of Gamal Abd-al-Nasser and other Sunni-Muslim-Arab states. ONE OF the greatest enthusiasts for this idea was the Shah of Iran, who became Israel's most ardent friend.

The "King of Kings" was a brutal dictator, hated by most of his people. But for many Israelis, Iran became a second home. Tehran became a Mecca for Israeli businessmen, some of whom became very rich. Experts of the Israeli Security Service, called Shabak (Hebrew initials of General Security Service) trained the Shah's detested secret police, called Savak.

High-ranking Israeli army commanders traveled freely through Iran to Iraqi Kurdistan, where they trained the Kurdish Peshmerga forces in their fight against Saddam Hussein's regime. (The Shah, of course, did not dream of giving freedom to his own Kurdish minority.)

This paradise came to a sudden end when the Shah made a deal with Saddam Hussein, in order to save his throne. To no avail. Radical Shiite clerics, who were very popular, overthrew the Shah and established the Shiite Islamic republic. Israel was out.

By the way, another element of the "Periphery" broke away too. In 1954 Ben-Gurion and his army chief, Moshe Dayan, hatched a plan to attack Lebanon and establish a pro-Israeli Maronite dictator there. The then Prime Minister, Moshe Sharet, who knew something about the Arab world, nixed this adventure, which he considered stupid. Thirty years later Ariel Sharon, another ignoramus, implemented the same plan, with disastrous results.

In 1982, the Israeli army invaded Lebanon. It duly installed a Maronite dictator, Basheer Jumayil, who signed a peace agreement with Israel and was soon assassinated. The Shiites, who populate the South of Lebanon, welcomed the Israeli army enthusiastically, believing that it would help them against the Sunni Muslims and withdraw. I was an eye-witness: driving alone in my civilian car from Metullah in Israel to Sidon on the Lebanon coast, I passed several Shiite villages and could hardly extricate myself (physically) from the embraces of the inhabitants.

However, when the Shiites realized that the Israelis had no intention of leaving, they started a guerrilla war against them. Thus Hezbollah was born and became one of Israel's most effective enemies - and an ally of the Shiite regime in Iran.

BUT IS the Shiite Iranian regime such a deadly enemy of Israel? I rather doubt it. Indeed, when the religious fanaticism of the new regime in Iran was at its height, a curious business occurred. It became known as "Iran-Contra" affair. Some conservatives in Washington DC wanted to arm rightist insurgents in leftist Nicaragua. American laws prevented them from doing so openly, so they turned to - who else? - Israel.

Israel sold arms to the Iranian Ayatollahs (yes, indeed!) and gave the proceeds to our Washington friends, who transferred them illegally to the Nicaraguan rightist terrorists, called "Contras."

The moral of the story: when it served their practical purposes, the Ayatollahs had no qualms at all about making deals with Israel, the "little Satan."

Iran needed the weapons Israel sent them because they were fighting a war against Saddam Hussein's Iraq. It was not the first one. For many centuries, Iraq served the Arab world as a bulwark against Iran. Iraq has a large Shiite population, but the Iraqi Shiites were Arabs and had no real sympathy for their fellow-Shiites in Iran. They still have little.

Israel helped Iran in that war because it feared Saddam Hussein. Therefore, Israel helped to convince the US to invade Iraq. The invasion was highly successful: Iraq was destroyed, and the historic bulwark against Iran disappeared. So it was Israel which helped to remove the main obstacle to Iran's hegemony over the Middle East.

Sounds crazy? Is crazy. Ben-Gurion's grand design has been stood on its head. At present, the "periphery" of Lebanon and Iran, supported by Turkey, is our mortal enemy, and the Sunni bloc of Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States and Egypt are our open or half-secret allies.

HERE I hear the impatient reader shout: "Cut the bullshit, what about the nuclear danger? What about the mad ayatollahs obtaining atomic bombs and annihilating us?"

Well, I am not afraid. Even if Iran obtains nuclear bombs, I shall sleep well. Why, for God's (or Allah's) sake? Because Israel is well provided with nuclear weapons and a second-strike capability.

Bombing Israel would mean the annihilation of Iran, the multi-millennial civilization, the proud heritage of innumerable philosophers, artists, poets and scientists. (The very word "algorithm" is derived from the name of the Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi).

The current Iranian rulers may be fanatics (I doubt it) but they are not suicidal. There is not a single indication in that direction. On the contrary, they seem eminently practical people.

So why do they clamor against Israel? Because their aim is to become the dominant force in the Muslim world, and cursing Israel is the obvious way. As long as Israel does not make peace with the Palestinians, the Arab and Muslim masses everywhere hate Israel. Iran's current leaders are very good at cursing the Little Satan.

Experts report that Islam has recently been losing strength as the main force in Iran, while Iranian nationalism has been gaining. The cult of Cyrus, who preceded Muhammad by more than 1200 years, is gaining ground.

SINCE THE nuclear bomb was invented, no nuclear-armed country has ever been attacked. Attacking a nuclear-armed country simply means suicide. Even the mighty USA (the "Big Satan") does not dare to attack little North Korea, whose endeavor to obtain a nuclear strike force is far from irrational.

The only people that can make Russiagate fade away are the ones that invented it in the first place: the spooks, Wall Street Democrats and institutional servants of capital that gathered in Hillary Clinton's overstuffed campaign tent, last year, to plot the next moves of a beleaguered U.S. empire.

Although a Bernie Sanders' upset in 2016 had always been a statistical impossibility, Donald Trump's capture of the Republican Party machinery had destabilized the duopoly political system at a time of great stress for U.S. imperialism.

The previous year, the Russian military had set up shop in Syria, blocking U.S.-backed jihadists from ousting the secular, Arab nationalist government of Bashar al Assad. It was Vladimir Putin's answer to the global military offensive launched by Barack Obama in 2011, with NATO's overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, followed immediately by the jihadist push into Syria; the Washington-engineered 2014 coup in Ukraine, on Russia's doorstep; and, also beginning in 2011, Obama's military "pivot" to the Pacific to confront China.

U.S. imperialism was on a roll, with a vengeance, occupying most of Africa and recovering the momentum lost with George W. Bush's humiliating defeat in Iraq. But Putin changed the game board in 2015, militarily intervening in Syria and declaring, with the world as his witness at the opening of the UN General Assembly, that the U.S. had been acting as a de facto ally of the very jihadists that it claimed to be fighting in its global war on terror. The 21st century's biggest lie had been exposed with a Russian megaphone, and confronted by Russian arms. America's jihadist foot soldiers were put on the run.

Perhaps even more fundamental, the bell tolled resoundingly on the terminal decline of U.S. empire when the International Monetary Fund announced that China had surpassed the United States as the world's biggest economy, based on "purchasing power parity." The "American Century" -- whenever it was supposed to have begun -- was now definitively over, despite the U.S. expending more on weapons than the rest of the world, combined. As 2014 came to end, Washington's mood turned morbid, yet meaner and more desperate than ever.

That same year, the domestic U.S. pot boiled over, as Black protest reawakened in Ferguson, Missouri, after a fitful, two-generation-long sleep. The centrality of race was reasserted in the world's first white settler state, further darkening the mood of a white populace whose skin privilege could not save them from the ravages of capitalist austerity and enforced, general precariousness. Donald Trump decided to make his move to seize the commanding heights of the White Man's Party.

The Orange Menace, a calculating real estate racist whose mass media marketing strategy is mistaken for "populism," ran a counter-establishment campaign that challenged the Lords of Capitals' right to move money and jobs across borders at will, and -- horror of horrors! -- questioned the need for the U.S. to wage endless wars around the world.

President Obama's Trans Pacific Partnership was already dead as the general election campaign began, but Trump's capture of the Republican Party -- the most reliable backer of the free flow of capital -- was deeply disturbing to the capitalist order. When Trump's mass base -- top-heavy with self-styled American "patriots" -- failed to recoil at their candidate's apparent willingness to explore some kind of detente with Russia, the national security state descended into utter panic. If Trump's "middle American" (white, socially right-wing) fans could not be counted on to give unquestioning support to U.S. imperial war policy, then where was the popular base to sustain Washington's military offensive in the world?

From that point on, Trump was viewed as an existential threat by most of the U.S. ruling class and its attendant national security and military-industrial complex sectors, and by the corporate media that represents their interests. They rushed into Hillary Clinton's Big Tent, claiming to make common cause with Blacks and other minorities. However, their actual agenda was preservation of the global capitalist order and sustaining the momentum of the U.S. military offensive that was begun in 2011.

The CIA, in particular, made Trump their National Security Enemy #1. They are the main architects of Russiagate -- a "conspiracy" in which the predicate Kremlin "crime" of DNC document-stealing remains unproven, and which pales into almost laughable insignificance when compared to decades of U.S. wars of regime change, economic strangulation, assassinations, and outright genocide around the world. Syria and Congo (6 million-plus dead) are crimes of the worst order known to humankind. Russiagate is a lie that would be no more than a Russian diplomatic blunder, even if true.

The corporate media are the public agents of the mass psychological operation. With media consolidation at such an advanced state, it turns out to be not all that difficult for a handful of media conglomerates, each tied inextricably to finance capital and in close collaboration with one of the corporate parties and all of the intelligence outfits, to create and sustain a "state of emergency" for a long period of time -- more than year, so far. This induced "state of emergency" is designed to prepare the American public, politically and psychologically, to maintain the momentum of the U.S. imperial offensive in the world, by demonizing Russia as an internal, as well as external, threat to the United States. In other words, Russiagate is an artificial crisis that was made necessary by the actual crisis of U.S. imperialism -- its economic decline and military dependence on jihadist foot soldiers, and just as importantly, the utter collapse of U.S. moral authority in the world.

The U.S. imperial orbit is shrinking, dramatically. Russiagate is the domestic response to this geopolitical reality. The real "conspirators" – the spooks, Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the Clintonite leaders of the Democratic Party, and the corporate media that serves them all -- are shrinking the American people's political vision to Halloween dimensions. Not only are there Russians lurking in every dark corner and under every bed, but they can buy a U.S. election or foment civil disturbance and political unrest for about $100,000 -- the price of a luxury car.

We are all fully aware of the appalling terrorist attack that took place in New York City on Tuesday. Eight people were killed, including five classmates from Argentina who were in the city for a 30th anniversary school reunion. Eleven other people were injured, including Martin Marro of Newton, Massachusetts. Marro was also there for the reunion, having been a classmate of the five Argentinians who were lost. Martin Marro, like millions of Americans including the president's mother, is an immigrant.

Donald Trump encompassed the horror of the event and nearly broke both legs getting to his phone so he could blame the attack on Chuck Schumer and legal immigration -- via Twitter, of course. "The terrorist came into our country through what is called the 'Diversity Visa Lottery Program,'" he wrote, "a Chuck Schumer beauty. I want merit based." All this while there was still blood on the bike path in Manhattan.

The function and history of the Diversity Visa Lottery Program is just complicated enough to make it an easy target for shameless grandstanders like the president. No, Chuck Schumer did not invent it. The program is the product of a bipartisan effort in the late 1980s to inspire more immigration from Western Europe, and was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush.

There is nothing special or different about the vetting process for the Diversity Lottery. Over the years, as economies improved in Western Europe, the bulk of immigrants applying for the Diversity Lottery shifted to countries like Nigeria, Nepal and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. All that is required to enter the lottery is the equivalent of a high school diploma or work experience in a skilled profession. Most people in the world, for a variety of reasons, have little chance of successfully immigrating to the US. The Diversity Lottery is often their best and only opportunity. Some 9 million people from 200 different nations applied in 2015, but only 50,000 a year are selected.

All are vetted the same way any potential immigrant from any other program is vetted. There is nothing special or different about the vetting process for the Diversity Lottery. The Manhattan attacker, an immigrant from Uzbekistan, was vetted and admitted under this program. By all reports, he became radicalized only after arriving in the US. Unless a homegrown terrorist walks onto a stage and announces their intentions, there is no vetting process presently on the planet capable of sniffing them out before they act.

Tuesday's Twitter comments were only the beginning. Trump made some remarks on Wednesday before his cabinet meeting on the matter of immigration, and they amounted to the same verbal demolition derby we have all come to expect and dread:

"I am today starting the process of terminating the diversary lottery program. I'm going to ask Congress to immediately initiate work to get rid of this program. Diversary and diversity lottery. Diversity lottery. Sounds nice. It's not nice. It's not good. It hasn't been good. We've been against it. So we want to immediately work with Congress on the Diversity Lottery Program, on terminating it, getting rid of it."

Like all of us, every president endures the occasional wrestling match with the language. Obama had his "57 states" gaffe, and George W. Bush made so many linguistic blunders that people in Texas started naming their children "Nukular" because they thought it was a word. This, though ... along with the king of China thing, the president of the Virgin Islands thing, calling all Germans "evil, very evil," very publicly failing to understand the concept of the national debt and so many more moments that would be piled around us in vast snowdrifts if groans could be granted substance ... this speaks to a larger and more disturbing phenomenon.

Within those four examples live relations with our greatest international adversary and trade partner, the aftermath of the hurricanes, international relations with Europe and fundamental monetary policy. Every topic he touches with his tongue curdles like old milk. The man is not ignorant. He simply, brazenly, aggressively does not care to know what he is talking about when he opens his gob or pounces on his phone.

Immigration -- like China, the hurricanes, trade and finance -- is an incredibly serious issue that directly impacts the lives of millions and plays a massively important role in our national economy. It is part of who we are as a country, as the big green lady in the water off Manhattan will attest to. The white nationalists who infest Trump's administration and brain trust like so many goose-stepping fleas understand immigration down to the last detail. They despise it and want to end it. Trump is racist enough to let them write the copy, details take the hindmost, and if he drops yet another commentary cowpie in the pasture, so much the better: Another distraction for the corporate "news" people to follow.

The pre-cabinet aria continued:

"We want a merit-based program where people come into our country based on merit. And we want to get rid of chain migration. This man that came in -- or whatever you want to call him -- brought in, with him, other people ... So we want to get rid of chain migration, and we've wanted to do that for a long time. And I've been wanting to do it for a long time. And we'll be asking Congress to start working on it immediately. There are bills already about ending chain migration and we have a lot of good bills in there. We're being stopped by Democrats because they're obstructionists."

Back then, chain migration focused on bringing over people from the same villages and communities in order to foster continuity within new immigrant enclaves in the US. The process has evolved to one where "chains" of family members are allowed to immigrate in order to foster that same continuity. The Diversity Visa Lottery Program is one iteration of a process that now spans three centuries. It is how the bulk of immigration to the US takes place.

Trump and his fascist white-power cadre seek to obliterate this fundamental aspect of the United States, and the president is more than willing to use a gruesome terror attack to grease the skids. The fact that he doesn't know what he is talking about, and that his own existence is owed to the very programs he seeks to destroy, only adds yet another layer of embarrassing unreality to the spectacle that is his administration.