There’s waaay too much well-aren’t-I-witty! energy going into quips and memes mocking Trump for his flub about shutting down airports. Some are genuinely funny, I get it. But a lot of that energy is covering for the fact that his festival of incompetence actually didn’t go so badly: he got his jingoistic backdrop, the crowd was a whole lot bigger than liberals would like, and he managed to go for 45 whole minutes without descending into stream-of-consciousness babble. For me, there are two interesting things about the flub: (1) you can see the clear cognitive process of how he stumbles over phonetics and regroups; and (2) I really want to know where this idea of shutting down airports came from. It isn’t just a linguistic game: there are serious creeps whispering seriously creepy things in his ear — the kind of people, not just one person like Stephen Miller, who are mounting a sustained, meticulously detail-oriented technocratic attack on immigration processes, for example. My hunch is that ‘shutting down airports’ is a window into another kind of incipient conversation going on around him.