Between the increasingly picayune wranglings over the nature of Donald Trump’s gag orders and the cries by journalists desperate for people to take seriously the things he says on the campaign trail, it’s become ever more clear that America doesn’t so much have a “free speech” problem as it is profoundly suffering thanks to cost-free speech.

We cannot seem to stop obsessing over the historical fact that the formal architecture of First Amendment law is insufficient to constrain the endless toxic spew of Trump’s threats and dark promises or his open calls for violence. It’s true that absolutely nothing in the founding texts and theories fully anticipated the hellscape that ensues when political leaders, intent on crashing through the outer bounds of respectable behavior into straight-up incitement and vigilantism, have access to forms of communication that make the meeting of the quill and the parchment as clear and meaningful as a fuzzy bunny.

But as we expend days, weeks, months, years asking ourselves how it is possible that anyone is allowed to say what Trump says, the question of how anyone manages to tolerate what he says is muted into near irrelevance. What Donald Trump is now expressly promising is perfectly clear—just look to his Veterans Day “vermin” speech; in an earlier statement that immigrants “come from mental institutions and insane asylums. … It’s poisoning the blood of our country”; and in promises to “aggressively deport resident aliens with jihadist sympathies.” Gone are the gauzy illusions that he just wants to make America safe. Gone are the double and triple meanings that we in the press used to parse for days. Donald Trump used to be described as inadvertently saying the quiet parts out loud, but now he is quite purposefully saying the fascism on the stump. Now he’s openly calling for mass deportations and the murder of his opponents and martial law.

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