History will remember this as the day Trump decided to replace Pence with her on the 2020 ticket.

Q: "What did the president mean when he said that some immigrants are non-people, they're animals?"

.@PressSec Sarah Sanders: "The president was very clearly referring to MS-13 gang members…" She also says, "Frankly, I think that the term 'animal' doesn't go far enough." pic.twitter.com/Icdt50eIsU

— CSPAN (@cspan) May 17, 2018

So ringing is her defense of POTUS that it’s almost as if it were scripted by POTUS himself!

A little taste from late last year of the what the definitely-not-animals of MS-13 get up to in their daily course of business:

Inside the shallow grave, a shredded, bloodstained sweatshirt hinted at a horrific crime.

“The victim had been stabbed over one-hundred times, decapitated, dismembered, and his heart had been excised from his chest and thrown into the grave,” Montgomery County detectives wrote in court papers made public last month…

“The brutality of the gangs’ crimes is increasingly horrific,” the Los Angeles Times reported in 2004. “Homicide victims, including many women and teenage girls, often are found so mutilated that Spanish priest Jose Maria Morataya, who runs a San Salvador rehabilitation and job training center for former gang members … suspects that some gang members practice satanic rituals.”

Laying aside the media’s shameless lying about who, exactly, Trump was describing as “animals” yesterday, I don’t strongly disagree with the substance of the criticism he’s getting. Do we want someone with life-and-death power dehumanizing anyone as an “animal,” even the degenerates in MS-13? My libertarian Magic Eightball says “probably not.” Should we give the benefit of the doubt to a man who, in his first speech as a candidate, framed the problem of illegal immigration writ large as one of drugs, crime, and rape? Eh. Is it true that Trump is more prone to describing minorities who commit heinous crimes as “animals” than whites who do so? That’d be hard to quantify with certainty but yeah, it’s conceivable. By dint of both his office and his character, let’s not get comfortable with him using language like this.

But let’s not get comfortable with the press deliberately distorting his point either, which they did and which some are defending retroactively today by enlisting the points I just noted. The most overused argument in politics right now is snorting “This is how you got Trump!” anytime his left-wing critics ding him for something he’s done that’s crassly populist but relatable, yet this incident really does fit it to a T. It’s easy for most, me included, to understand how bringing up a gang known for decapitating people in a conversation might trigger a little righteous rhetorical disgust, yet we’re now on day two of indignant pearl-clutching about it. If Trump had called the Nazis in Charlottesville “animals” instead of launching into his “very fine people on both sides” garbage, there’d have been no uproar. If anything, it’d have been treated as a pleasant surprise, proof that the president knows an enemy of civilization when he sees one and isn’t afraid to call it by its name. In this case he said it about actual killers but in the context of illegal immigration, ergo problematic.

Exit quotation:

.@POTUS: "MS-13, these are animals, they are coming into our country, we're getting them out. They come in again, we're getting them out. We need strong immigration laws." pic.twitter.com/btzcV7ZELh

— FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) May 17, 2018