This week’s latest assault on the senses emerges from— where else?— the nation’s capital, this time in the form of Attorney General Jeff “Beauregard” Sessions. The nation’s top law enforcement officer on Monday warned that the US Department of Justice will “claw-back” funding to any city that “willfully violates immigration law.”

"Countless Americans would be alive today - and countless loved ones would not be grieving today - if the policies of these sanctuary jurisdictions were ended," Sessions drawled, ignoring the fact that no city — certainly none in Massachusetts— harbors violent fugitives.

Leave it to us Yankees to set the record straight, Jeff.

"What I think AG Sessions is about is scare tactics, fear-mongering, and he doesn't seem to have any interest in actually looking at what's happening on the ground in communities," said our attorney general, Maura Healey.

And our mayor, Marty Walsh, was spot on when he added: "To me it seems like another diversion. It doesn't change anything the way we do business in Boston. We're going to continue to be an open, inclusive city."

Stripping funds from cities that are doing the actual day-to-day work of protecting citizens is a calculated, pathetic misdirection. It’s the latest proof that Trumpists will do whatever they can to offer cover to the con-artist-in-chief and the still-unraveling Russian collusion scandal.