Here’s an important rule to live by:
If the case being made is supported by lies, then the argument is invalid and the case isn’t real.
Case in point:
Trump is claiming that there is an emergency at our southern border. Put aside the fact that four days before Christmas, Trump said exactly the opposite when he tweeted this:
The tweet alone should bring the idea of an emergency on the border to a screeching halt.
If there is a real emergency on our southern border, there would be cold, hard facts to support this claim.
Here is what we have heard so far:
A week ago, Trump claimed that “some” of the former United States Presidents had spoken to him in support of the wall, expressing regret that they had not built it themselves.
Every living President has refuted this claim.
Then, prior to Trump’s address to the nation on Tuesday night, Vice President Mike Pence went on multiple television networks and said that 17,000 individuals with criminal histories had been apprehended on our southern border in 2018.
Except this was not true. Not even close.
The 17,000 individuals referenced by Pence constituted every single person stopped at every possible point of entry in the United States for every possible reason.
Not only those on the southern border, and no only those with criminal histories. If you were stopped on the border because of a problem with your passport or an undeclared jar of strawberry jam, you were included in that number.
So Pence was lying.
In total, 362,000 people were apprehended by Border Patrol, but of those:
Only 6,259 had criminal convictions on their records.
Of those, fewer than 800 had been convicted of violent crimes or crimes involving firearms.
A lot fewer than Pence’s number.
On Sunday morning, White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders claimed that 4,000 known or suspected terrorists attempted to enter the United States last year and that our southern border is the easiest means of entry.
But Fox News anchor Chris Wallace pointed out that none of those 4,000 terrorists or suspected terrorists attempted to enter through the southern border.
All fo them were apprehended at airports. Every single one.
But even this proved not to be entirely true, because of the 4,000 apprehended, only 6 were actually detained.
In fact a vast majority of undocumented immigrants arrive to the US via airplanes, and the rate of illegal immigration on our southern border (and throughout the country) has been declining for years.
Then Trump spoke to the nation on Tuesday night and told Americans that:
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Border security officials have requested a wall.
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The Democrats have requested that the wall be constructed of steel rather than concrete.
Neither one of these are even close to being true.
The truth is that not a single member of Congress who represents a district on the border supports the wall, including Republican William Hurd, a former CIA agent who campaigned against the wall and won.
Yesterday, Trump claimed that he never promised that Mexico would directly pay for the wall, even though campaign video footage and documents still on the Trump campaign website record Trump saying that Mexico would make a “one time payment of ten to twenty billion dollars” to pay for the wall.
All of this is important because Trump and his administration are lying again and again to the American people in order to defend a wall on the southern border that less than a third of Americans support.
Blatant, bold-faced lies.
And not only is Trump willing to lie to the American people, but folks like Mike Pence and Sarah Sanders are willing to appear on national television and do the same.
A racist President who launched his Presidential campaign by calling Mexican immigrants “rapists, and some good people, I suppose” is attempting to save face by demanding a wall that Americans don’t want and Mexico refuses to pay for by shutting down the government and causing hardship to millions of Americans who are either out of work or lacking basic government services.
This is a man who questioned why we accept immigrants from “shit hole” African nations and why we don’t accept more immigrants from places like Norway.
Trump’s wall is an attempt to stop immigration at the border because the people crossing that border are not white. It’s the act of a racist who wants to preserve the white majority status by preventing Mexicans and Africans and anyone else whose skin is brown from entering our country.
But he has no facts to support his cause. No data to defend his arguments. So he lies. His administration lies. They make up and manipulate numbers in hopes of stoking fear and resentment while damaging the lives of millions of Americans who are suffering during a government shut down.
It’s an amoral act of an administration that cares nothing for the American people.
The lies are the proof.
