On Monday, the U.S. officially moved its Israeli embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail to make the move, and it's widely seen as a decision that will jeopardize the stability of the region and further inflame tensions between Palestinians and the Israeli military. Palestinians have been protesting the move, and as of now at least 40 protesters have been killed and nearly 800 shot by the military, including medics moving in to help those already wounded.

But this massacre hasn't dimmed the enthusiasm of the ceremony. In fact, every aspect of the move seems designed to be deliberately provocative, right down to who Trump chose to pray during the ceremony: Dallas-based pastor Robert Jeffress, a bigot so notorious and high-profile that even Mitt Romney was moved to condemn his selection.

As Romney points out, Jeffress has been overtly anti-Muslim for years, and his anti-Semitic statements are low-key enough to give him room to deny it. He's also trotted out tired anti-gay talking points throughout his career, claiming that 70 percent of gay people have AIDS and throwing words like "perversion" and "pedophilia" around like Rick Santorum didn't do it better.

None of that should be surprising, though, from an aggressively right-wing pastor. But he's also Trump-backed, so of course he's got a lot more deranged nonsense up his sleeve. He once linked Obama to the Antichrist before unironically throwing his support behind Trump. He's claimed that laws protecting transgender people are a bigger threat to the U.S. than ISIS and insisted that American Christians are on the road to being persecuted like Jews in Nazi Germany.

In a lot of ways, Jeffress is the ideal selection for the Trump administration, and not just because he's been enthusiastically fawning over and defending the president since the election. Sending him helps Trump signal to his base that he's still kowtowing to the most extreme and bigoted fringes of U.S. evangelicalism. But Jeffress is also a real-life troll who loves to make shocking statements and bask in the attention he gets from decent people calling him out. There are plenty of religious leaders across the country who neither think that all Jews are hell-bound nor thoughtlessly throw around Holocaust comparisons. Instead, the president chose to send this human stack of used Left Behind books.

But trolling has been Trump's foreign policy ever since he announced his Muslim ban. Trolling is why he moved the embassy to Jerusalem in the first place. Jeffress is essentially the Scott Pruitt of religious dialogue: You choose him only if you want to torpedo the whole thing. His presence on an international stage is nothing short of a middle finger to anyone who doesn't want the planet consumed in a holy war.