Donald Trump opens his mouth, or fires off a tweet, and the entire political and major media world respond like Pavlov’s dogs.

His latest racist comments against four women Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives has them all barking, and has no one considered that this is all according to plan?

Trump has used outrageous remarks to fuel outrage from the beginning of his public career. Person One: Hey, you need to pay me what you owe me! Trump: Oh no, look, there’s a black person who’ll destroy our neighborhood! Person One: Oh damn! Let’s stop him!

How many times, Charlie Brown, are you going to try to kick that football? You get dirtier, and angrier, and hungrier, and yet still just as prone to howl when Trump winds up the siren.

There are two targets of this approach: the first is the dwindling numbers among his base who actually admire his penchant for the outrageous; the second is the media and the political establishment who shift the political spotlight from whatever else may be more important to a few foul words out of his mouth.

The world is falling apart. Turkey is buying from Russia. Our supreme North Korean leader is calling his “friend” Trump a frightened dog. Inhumane conditions being inflicted against thousands of helpless poor by our own American government are at criminal levels.

History books, should they still exist after where the current trends are leading us, will spotlight pictures of those Republican lawmakers with Vice President Pence looking on passively and dispassionately at the caged hundreds crying and pleading to them for basic decency.

So perhaps it should be no surprise that the U.S. and the West are doing nothing while the Chinese subject a million Uyghur muslims to brutal “reeducation” concentration camp prisons.

Nobody say a word. Let the horrors of totalitarian regimes systematically brutalize and sanction the murder of LGBT persons in Kosovo and by other cruel regimes.

Trump and his team is trying to rev up a racist segment of the U.S. population to obfuscate the fact that his policies are an abject failure, a giveway to the authoritarians across the globe including his master Putin, that his massive tax cut helped only the wealthiest while shrinking the opportunities and options of the vast majority of us still further.

But of all these, the greatest threat to Trump in the recent period has been the recent actions by the best law enforcement resources America has domestically in a concerted and coordinated effort to bring this arch criminal to justice.

That is, the arrest of alleged serial pedophile and rapist of underage girls Jeffrey Epstein was conducted earlier this month not by a sex crimes investigative division, but by a political corruption division of the law enforcement resources of the South District of Manhattan.

If anybody has any idea how many crimes, in fact, Trump has committed in the course of his lifetime, these law enforcement resources are most likely to have the best idea.

They’re going for the jugular against Trump, make no mistake about it, buoyed by all the evidence that Trump’s former enforcer attorney Michael Cohen and others have provided, the fruits of the Mueller investigation. That brought them to Jeffrey Epstein’s doorstep in a stealth operation that left Trump and his lapdog attorney general Willam Barr in the dark.

These people have always known Trump was a crook, but they never had the motivation to really lower the hammer on him until he became president and started a holy war against the law enforcement and intelligence community itself. There is going to be no mercy for Trump. He’s the champion of no one, he’s a 100 percent charlatan who internally is a complete and total coward.

Epstein’s child trafficking and rapist operation functioned as a blackmailing resource to keep politicians and other powerful persons in check. The sad sack Trump is one of its pathetic victims. As such, the Epstein operation remains a tool of hostile foreign powers, at least Russia but maybe more.

Don’t let a couple foul words from Trump this week obscure that.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com.