Vox - President Trump’s primetime TV speech: news and updateshttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2019-01-09T15:50:06-05:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/179378642019-01-09T15:50:06-05:002019-01-09T15:50:06-05:00The New York Times and AP bungled their fact checks of Trump’s speech — badly
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<img alt="President Trump Addresses The Nation On Border Security From The Oval Office" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/aR8gqHgkrAIFdSYllVM0FwFjdXc=/50x0:5383x4000/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62818618/1091593084.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Carlos Barria-Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>False equivalency is creeping into the fact-checking business.</p> <p id="HfduXU">Fact-checkers wandered into false equivalency territory Tuesday night after President Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration and Democrats’ response to it. </p>
<p id="SjOvMn">The Associated Press was clobbered on Twitter after it anointed the Democratic claim that Trump was at fault for the shutdown “false,” saying that the Democrats are at fault too. As the AP <a href="https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/status/1082857277084893184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">put it on Twitter</a>: it takes “two to tango.” </p>
<p id="U595Gl">The New York Times, meanwhile, attempted to fact-check a “should” claim made by Democrat Chuck Schumer — the kind of statement that doesn’t really lend itself to a fact check at all. </p>
<p id="te4a7P">Fact-checking has evolved during Trump’s time in office — mainstream news outlets are far more likely to call a lie a lie than they used to. Even on Tuesday night, big outlets relied on policy expertise to clearly dispute Trump’s false claims. </p>
<p id="R4Lx9d">But the night also revealed that outlets still feel the urge to find fault on both sides or assign neutral blame for political problems. The political press has long wanted to cover politics like a sport, to cover the plays of each party as if they are morally and ethically the same. On a night when the president looked the public in the eye and lied about why the government has been shut down for weeks, the press needs to not fall into the false equivalency trap.</p>
<h3 id="Vaun91">The Associated Press tried to fact-check who is to blame</h3>
<p id="4W987o">Following Trump’s speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered a rebuttal in which <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174669/trump-speech-immigration-fact-check-border">they placed blame for the shutdown squarely at Trump’s feet</a>.</p>
<p id="ZHQei7">“The fact is, on the very first day of this Congress, House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation to reopen government and fund smart, effective border security solutions,” Pelosi said. “But the president is rejecting these bipartisan bills, which would reopen government over his obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall — a wall he always promised Mexico would pay for.”</p>
<p id="McLc7U">Blaming Trump is entirely reasonable. The shutdown began last month, when Republicans still controlled both the House and Senate, and after the Senate unanimously passed a funding bill that would’ve kept the government open but didn’t fund Trump’s wall. </p>
<p id="rgZdU9">But in response to criticism from his far-right supporters, Trump at the last minute decided not to support the Senate bill. During an Oval Office event with Pelosi and Schumer, Trump even said he was “proud to shut down the government” and vowed he wouldn’t blame Democrats for it.</p>
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<p id="md4Nhl">But following Pelosi and Schumer’s rebuttal on Tuesday event, the Associated Press published a “fact check” in which it tried to blame both sides for the shutdown because Democrats refuse to give Trump what he demands. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">AP FACT CHECK: Democrats put the blame for the shutdown on Trump. But it takes two to tango. Trump's demand for $5.7 billion for his border wall is one reason for the budget impasse. The Democrats refusal to approve the money is another. <a href="https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d">https://t.co/9IWnqUgl2d</a></p>— AP Politics (@AP_Politics) <a href="https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/status/1082857277084893184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="f50Fyd">First off, the question of who is to blame for something is not the sort of thing that lends itself to fact-checking. Facts can be independently verified, whereas assigning blame is a matter of debate.</p>
<p id="Eo9uxE">But beyond that, the AP’s analysis of the situation is at odds with the underlying facts. Democrats, to use the AP’s language, have attempted to tango, offering Trump various concessions and deals before the shutdown. Trump wouldn’t budge; now he’s offering Democrats nothing in return for his demand. That’s not a negotiation. </p>
<p id="XN3ZQF">Plus, Trump admitted, on tape, that if a shutdown happened, he’d be fully responsible. </p>
<p id="vNkWzu">Predictably, the AP’s “two to tango” tweet was widely mocked. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">AP FACT CHECK: Critics claim that cigarettes cause cancer. But it takes two to tango. Cigarettes do not cause cancer unless somebody smokes them first.</p>— Bobby Lewis (@revrrlewis) <a href="https://twitter.com/revrrlewis/status/1083024666598477826?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="tqCBh8">On Wednesday morning, the AP similarly posted<a href="https://twitter.com/AP_Politics/status/1082985603011174401"> another tweet</a> pitting Democrats’ factual claim about the border against Trump’s unsupported claims about a “security crisis.” Later in the day, it tried to clarify its widely criticized fact check of Trump with a statement that didn’t help anything.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Asked <a href="https://twitter.com/AP?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@AP</a> about that much-criticized tweet promoting a fact-check on the shutdown and got this statement from a spox. <a href="https://t.co/B1ywSIWY4D">https://t.co/B1ywSIWY4D</a> <a href="https://t.co/tASfHjZW33">pic.twitter.com/tASfHjZW33</a></p>— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) <a href="https://twitter.com/ErikWemple/status/1083043532380794881?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<h3 id="uBv9Xt">The New York Times fact-checked a “should” statement</h3>
<p id="9d3ort">Following Pelosi and Schumer’s rebuttal, the New York Times attempted to fact-check a claim that wasn’t even intended to be a factual statement. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Fact Check: Senator Chuck Schumer's response to President Trump's address <a href="https://t.co/aaKB6NMLPQ">https://t.co/aaKB6NMLPQ</a> <a href="https://t.co/7IdMsXWEMs">pic.twitter.com/7IdMsXWEMs</a></p>— The New York Times (@nytimes) <a href="https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1082839415075061760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="AFxRXJ">Schumer’s claim is a “should” claim — it’s <a href="https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1082844039630782464">normative</a>. He’s making a case that the president of the United States shouldn’t hold the federal government hostage to his demands. </p>
<p id="lMjaAs">Not only is the Schumer claim in question not the sort of thing that lends itself to fact-checking, but the Times’s comment about how “millions of Americans are not being directly harmed” is in itself incorrect. About 800,000 federal workers — many with families — are about to <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/9/18172329/partial-government-shutdown-paycheck">miss paychecks</a> because of the shutdown. Of course millions will be affected. </p>
<h3 id="wMYJq6">Fact-checking is in a weird place now that norms about lying have gone out the window</h3>
<p id="xywbik">To say that Trump has challenged the business of fact-checking is a bit of an understatement. The New York Times has devoted a number of words to the subject of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/media/donald-trump-lie-media.html">when to call “a lie a lie”</a> in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/business/media/donald-trump-lie-media.html">its pages</a>. </p>
<p id="A6CH5V">Trump has done more lying in his public statements than any recent president. According to the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/12/21/president-trump-has-made-false-or-misleading-claims-over-days/">Washington Post’s Fact Checker</a>, by the end of last year, Trump had made 7,645 false or misleading claims since taking office. The New York Times <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/14/opinion/sunday/trump-lies-obama-who-is-worse.html">reported</a> that Trump told six times more lies in his first 10 months as president than Barack Obama did during his entire eight years in office. </p>
<p id="winW1q">In an interview <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/9/26/13063004/real-time-fact-checking-debate-trump-clinton">Vox’s Tara Golshan did with fact-checking expert Lucas Graves</a> during the 2016 presidential election, Graves explained that the problem goes far beyond the literal facts:</p>
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<p id="LI9tv3">Trump is really unusual in his style of speech. Imagine, if the race right now were between Clinton and Bush, how different the political discourse would be. That is not to say that Clinton and Bush don’t exaggerate, don’t mislead, or don’t engage in all the routine political distortions that are a part of political life — they absolutely do — but with Trump, it is not only a question of being misleading; it is that a lot of his discourse is just free of factual claims.</p>
<p id="QOvEvi">He makes insinuations, he makes suggestions, he draws associations, for instance between <a href="http://www.vox.com/2016/6/13/11919998/trump-orlando-muslim-obama-conspiracy"><strong>President Obama and radical jihadists</strong></a>. What is the factual basis for the association? What is he actually saying about anti-American terrorists? He doesn’t tell whether Obama is secretly sympathetic to them or is secretly on their side. He doesn’t lay out his claims, so that makes fact-checking him a special challenge.</p>
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<p id="JN44sY">Vox did its own fact check of Trump’s speech, pointing out the entire basis of his case for the border wall <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174669/trump-speech-immigration-fact-check-border">is rooted in two false premises</a>. </p>
<p id="NI4uQG">Yet inherent in the mainstream media’s fact-checking is a sense that they need to even the score. This was the subject of some tweets from Democratic superstar Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who pointed out the Washington Post’s fact-checking team assigned the same number of “Pinocchios” to false claims about the military budget as they did to Trump’s flat denial of the death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">Or why did <a href="https://twitter.com/washingtonpost?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@washingtonpost</a> give my confusing tweet on military accounting offsets the same “Pinocchios” as Trump’s flat denial of how many Americans died in Puerto Rico?<br><br>These are legitimate questions not intended to attack. Who makes these decisions? How? Is there a rubric?</p>— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) <a href="https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1082372069113954304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 7, 2019</a>
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<p id="vrLULA">Ultimately, that prominent news outlets are now struggling to “fact check” claims that don’t even try to express facts suggests that a certain model of “calling strikes and balls” isn’t really working anymore. Trump has changed the rules of the game, but in some cases, the umpires still haven’t figured it out.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/9/18175186/trump-oval-office-speech-fact-check-failuresAaron Rupar2019-01-09T12:02:58-05:002019-01-09T12:02:58-05:00Trump’s big immigration speech was based on 2 false premises
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<img alt="Trump Delivers Message From Oval Office" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vK7EfA59Xy2ML6mewrZUDBm6hUI=/557x0:5009x3339/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62813950/1074777140.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Zach Gibson-Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>The president wants you to be very afraid. The facts say you shouldn’t be.</p> <p id="uyqm9T">Eighteen days into a government shutdown that began when he announced he announced he wouldn’t sign a bipartisan government funding bill approved by the Senate that didn’t include money for his border wall, President Donald Trump delivered an Oval Office speech on Tuesday night in which he grounded his case for a wall in two false premises.</p>
<h3 id="xCXHrd">Drugs</h3>
<p id="MJzu6e">The first false premise Trump pushed is that a border wall is needed to stop the flow of drugs into the country: </p>
<blockquote><p id="FIsrPJ">Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs — including meth, heroin, cocaine, and fentanyl. Every week, 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. </p></blockquote>
<p id="Eo22gm">Trump’s facts are correct, but the conclusion he draws doesn’t follow from them. The majority of drugs smuggled through the southern border <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174768/trump-wall-opioid-epidemic-heroin">come through official ports of entry</a> — not the areas in between them. </p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">WATCH: President Trump <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/BorderSecurity?src=hash&ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">#BorderSecurity</a> Address (FULL SPEECH) <a href="https://t.co/AiZXvmFG7t">pic.twitter.com/AiZXvmFG7t</a></p>— CSPAN (@cspan) <a href="https://twitter.com/cspan/status/1082827809276481536?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="1XG1PS">According to a 2015 report by the Drug Enforcement Administration, most heroin smuggled into the country comes in via vehicles driven through “legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods. Body carriers represent a smaller percentage of the heroin movement and they typically smuggle amounts ranging from three to six pounds taped to their torso, or in shoes and backpacks.”</p>
<p id="ybBudZ">A border wall would do nothing to prevent drugs from being smuggled via vehicles or on persons who enter the US through ports of entry.</p>
<h3 id="25vGPx">Crime</h3>
<p id="KjJdro">The second false premise Trump pushed is that Americans should be afraid that undocumented immigrants will murder their families:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="PClnv1">The only thing that is immoral [about the wall] is the politicians who do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized. America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien who just came across the border. The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country. </p>
<p id="icCnIV">Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders. In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl. </p>
<p id="umR12A">Over the last several years, I have met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices and the sadness gripping their souls. How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?</p>
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<p id="SBF3KX">But Trump’s suggestion that undocumented immigrants are more prone to commit acts of violence is false. A 2018 <a href="https://www.cato.org/publications/immigration-research-policy-brief/criminal-immigrants-texas-illegal-immigrant">Cato Institute study</a> that looked at crime in Texas found that “As a percentage of their respective populations, there were 56 percent fewer criminal convictions of illegal immigrants than of native-born Americans in Texas in 2015.”</p>
<p id="xvsBzv">“The criminal conviction rate for legal immigrants was about 85 percent below the native-born rate,” it adds. </p>
<p id="7hIrLo">In an overview of the relevant social science research published last year, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/two-charts-demolish-the-notion-that-immigrants-here-illegally-commit-more-crime/?utm_term=.650bb11b7579">the Washington Post concluded</a>, “Undocumented immigrants are considerably less likely to commit crime than native-born citizens, with immigrants legally in the United States even less likely to do so.”</p>
<h3 id="SjijDL">Trump’s speech was littered with falsehoods</h3>
<p id="2TYg9D">Trump’s claims about drugs and immigrant crime weren’t the only false ones he pushed during his speech. At another point, he falsely claimed that there has been a “sharp rise in unlawful migration fueled by our very strong economy.” But as <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lying">Vox’s Dara Lind detailed</a>, overall, unauthorized migration to the US has in fact fallen steadily since the Great Recession.</p>
<p id="TjuIxq">Trump also falsely claimed that the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal which has still not been approved by Congress will “indirectly” pay for the wall. But there is no provision in the trade deal <a href="https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2019/jan/04/donald-trump/no-usmca-trade-deal-wont-pay-border-wall-despite-d/">stipulating that Mexico will provide money</a> to the US for a wall.</p>
<p id="Tt6t7x">Though there was speculation heading into the speech that Trump would use the occasion to declare <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18172749/trump-national-emergency-government-shutdown-wall">a legally controversial national emergency</a> that could potentially allow him to build the wall without Congress appropriating money for it, he didn’t do so. Instead, he reiterated his demand that Democrats in Congress support legislation that would provide him with $5.7 billion for a wall that is estimated to cost $20 billion or more. </p>
<p id="fHmkV9">“At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall,” Trump said; the bizarre implication was that this would somehow be a carrot for Democrats. </p>
<p id="9qpmxq">Following Trump’s speech, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer delivered rebuttals in which they indicated they weren’t persuaded by what Trump had to say.</p>
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<p lang="en" dir="ltr">.<a href="https://twitter.com/SenSchumer?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@SenSchumer</a>: "We don't govern by tantrum...The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall. So our suggestion is a simple one. Mr President, reopen the government & we can work to resolve our differences over border security. But end this shutdown now." <a href="https://t.co/saWBEFgl2p">pic.twitter.com/saWBEFgl2p</a></p>— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) <a href="https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1082825538870407169?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 9, 2019</a>
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<p id="W8JeVF">“<a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174543/reaction-trump-immigration-speech-democratic-response-tonight">We don’t govern by temper tantrum</a>,” Schumer said, after Pelosi reminded Trump that both the Senate and House passed bipartisan bills that would’ve kept the government open, without funding Trump’s wall. “The symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot wall. So our suggestion is a simple one. Mr. President, reopen the government, and we can work to resolve our differences over border security. But end this shutdown now.”</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174669/trump-speech-immigration-fact-check-borderAaron Rupar2019-01-09T08:27:29-05:002019-01-09T08:27:29-05:00Trump’s immigration speech was an insult to the nation’s intelligence
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<img alt="President Trump Addresses The Nation On Border Security From The Oval Office" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vFdunxg1PduOwkLWz2BX70Qmnb0=/0x0:3500x2625/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62814023/1079457888.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>President Trump’s address on border security on January 8. | Kevin Dietsch/Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p>Trump’s speech failed fact-checks. It misinformed and persuaded no one. Why was it aired?</p> <p id="YjPgYr">After watching President Trump’s primetime immigration speech Tuesday, my overwhelming impression was this: Why, oh why, did anyone think it was a good idea to air this on national television?</p>
<p id="g1GFJC">The most memorable portion of the address came when the president listed off a series of gruesome crimes committed by undocumented immigrants. He went into graphic detail, discussing the use of a hammer on one victim and the dismemberment of another. This, he argued, is why America needs a border wall: Undocumented immigrants are dangerous, and their entry must be blocked at all costs.</p>
<p id="98AAvu">Except this is false. The data shows that undocumented immigrants are actually <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/two-charts-demolish-the-notion-that-immigrants-here-illegally-commit-more-crime/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.83e130285a15">considerably less likely to commit crimes</a>; states with more undocumented immigrants actually <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/19/two-charts-demolish-the-notion-that-immigrants-here-illegally-commit-more-crime/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.83e130285a15">tend to have lower crime rates</a>.</p>
<p id="fLyNO0">So the most striking part of the whole presentation was a lie, a recitation of anecdotes designed to mislead Americans about immigration and gin up anti-immigrant sentiment to score political points.</p>
<p id="eYh7vZ">There was no reason this should have been nationally televised. The president was not announcing news of grave national import, like an attack on American soil or a declaration of war. There’s no rule that networks have to air a presidential primetime address. President Obama once tried to deliver a similar immigration address, <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18172419/trump-immigration-speech-networks-obama">but the networks turned him down</a>, saying it was overtly political. </p>
<p id="u9KRXE">Yet they let Trump deliver a propaganda speech, one that likely persuaded very few people and left at least some Americans marginally less informed than when it began.</p>
<p id="E7EkJe">The networks could have chosen not to air this. They did not. The result was a national embarrassment.</p>
<h3 id="X6PrvJ">Trump’s speech: just, why?</h3>
<p id="pt5hGC">Political scientists <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/the-unpersuaded-2">generally believe</a> that presidential speeches are not actually very good at persuading the public. The people who are paying attention have already made up their minds, typically siding with whatever their party says. A speech by a Republican president may get Republicans interested in whatever the president is talking about but anger an equal number of Democrats. The net effect is pretty much a wash.</p>
<p id="wK7r1g">If you watched this speech, you’ll understand why this almost certainly isn’t an exception. Trump delivered his words in a relentless monotone, boring even those of us who had to pay close attention for professional reasons. Trump, a dynamic speaker off the cuff, just seems to be really bad at reading teleprompters. The only exception was the graphic description of murders, which also happened to be the most manipulative part of the address.</p>
<p id="haDlnx">And the content was totally unsurprising. Everybody paying attention knows that Trump wants to build a wall, that he thinks undocumented immigration is bad, and that’s why he was willing to shut down the government. That was the entire speech, minus some details. There was no news value in hearing those things reiterated.</p>
<p id="YeYk1M">And the details ranged from banal to misleading to outright false. At one point, Trump implied that cracking down on undocumented immigration would end the opioid crisis. This is absurd for <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174768/trump-wall-opioid-epidemic-heroin">any number of reasons</a>: Prescription drugs are a big part of the problem, most heroin comes in through ports of entry rather than being smuggled over the border, and a border wall (Trump’s biggest demand) would be particularly useless in stopping mass drug smuggling.</p>
<p id="aNnVje">So in broad strokes, the speech likely persuaded nobody and made no new or particularly compelling arguments. The networks’ decision to air it, if it had any effect on the public, probably on net made the viewing audience less informed.</p>
<p id="zsEA6u">And the Democratic response was also somewhat pointless. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer were about as boring as Trump was, simply reiterating their position that the government should be reopened and the status of the border wall should be determined later. Again, everybody knew that, and likely nobody was persuaded by their monotonous delivery.</p>
<p id="jTZpds">There was no point in any of this. It was a waste of our time as a nation at best, and at worst made us a little bit more ignorant and a little bit more bigoted. Network executives need to ask themselves some hard questions about why they chose to air this, and just how complicit they are in the president’s ability to spread lies about immigrants with ease.</p>
<p id="xlxEl4"></p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174773/trump-speech-fact-check-immigrationZack Beauchamp2019-01-09T08:27:08-05:002019-01-09T08:27:08-05:00The real crisis is that Trump has no idea what he’s doing
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<img alt="President Trump Addresses The Nation On Border Security From The Oval Office" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/KZ4X1hp2w_X-TSvcfxYp5k_FDPE=/318x0:4571x3190/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62813988/1079459272.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A flailing president whines and dissembles from the Oval Office.</p> <p id="fEBkoN">Donald Trump campaigned on the absurd lie that the United States could construct a large concrete wall across the entire US-Mexico border and coerce the Mexican government into paying for its construction. The government is currently shut down because Trump refuses to admit that his absurd lie was, in fact, an absurd lie. </p>
<p id="xncUMR">Since he won’t own up to it, lie has begun to pile upon lie like a sitcom farce, to the point where Trump on Tuesday night delivered an address on the subject of an entirely fake “crisis” at the southern border. The crisis, supposedly, is the reason that we not only need a wall but need it so badly that it’s worth shutting down the government to get one.</p>
<p id="Yz0DH0">It’s an absurd situation only heightened by the larger absurdity that the fundamentals of Trump-era America are good. Unemployment is low and the economy is growing. Unauthorized immigration is low. Funds are flowing to further enhance border security, and a halfway competent president would be able to secure more without much muss or fuss. But Donald Trump doesn’t do anything without muss or fuss. So he’s now mired in a historically low approval rating, and we as a country are mired in the overlapping fake security crisis at the border and the very real crisis of a shutdown of much of the federal government. </p>
<p id="KBfsgC">And the realest crisis of all is the fact that in Donald Trump, we have a president who has no idea what he’s doing. </p>
<h3 id="MQHREJ">Trump’s wall of nonsense</h3>
<p id="Lf4DqO">Whether or not it’s a good idea, at the end of the day, a president who wanted to get Congress to appropriate some extra money to build some extra steel fencing would be able to get that done. </p>
<p id="0qIZ6l">Not everyone in Congress would agree that it’s a good idea, but the federal budget is full of line items that not everyone likes. But if something is important to the White House, they find a way to get it done by making concessions on other fronts. </p>
<p id="ILE9kT">There are, however, two huge problems for Trump with that approach.</p>
<p id="Kkf0Lv">One is that immigration hawks themselves <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/28/18158873/wall-shutdown-trump-dreamers-deal">do not believe that the marginal value of additional fence-building is high</a>, largely because the United States already has a lot of border fences, which means the most valuable fencing is already in place. Consequently, immigration restrictionists in Congress and in the White House have been unwilling to strike a deal that offers Democrats anything of value — hence the need to try to extort the money from Democrats with the shutdown.</p>
<p id="pOoJqm">The other is that the key premise of Trump’s campaign was that all the wonky kvetching about the impossibility of his absurd border wall was just excuse-making by feckless politicians. That was the central political premise of his campaign — that he, Trump, would get tough in a unique way. To admit that actually, his critics were right all along and the smartest thing to do is simply to continue what the Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations were already doing would be politically devastating. </p>
<p id="4Ck7Bb">So Trump is asking Democrats to help him out of a political jam that he created by lying, and in exchange, he’s offering them nothing. Not surprisingly, they are not taking the deal.</p>
<h3 id="H8eBh9">Addicted to dishonesty</h3>
<p id="8fmlzO">In advance of the speech, the White House reportedly decided to for once worry about what media fact-checkers would say and consequently tried harder than usual to keep Trump on script and limited to factually accurate assertions. </p>
<p id="DeX907">This no doubt accounts for the prominent role that drug abuse ended up playing in the speech, since America is living through a very real spike in drug overdoses, and it is true that a lot of illicit drugs originate in Mexico. Back in the real world, however, this is a total non sequitur. No serious analyst believes you can fundamentally halt drug addictions purely by trying to intervene on the supply side. We need treatment for people with addiction, and we need initiatives to give new cohorts of people better alternatives to opioid abuse. </p>
<p id="0cDOc6">Illicit drug trafficking, meanwhile, is an <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/19/15326286/trump-wall-opioid-epidemic">unfortunate side of effect of legitimate commerce</a>. </p>
<p id="NRhRfu">The drugs are smuggled through the normal ports of entry, and solutions involve more intensive screening, with trade-offs including not just money but, perhaps more importantly, the fact that very intense screening could undermine normal trade. </p>
<p id="L8sJs0">Most of all, this whole question of inspections at legal ports of entry simply isn’t a hot-button partisan issue or any kind of crisis. Most of the specifics of what Trump said about drugs is true, but the idea that drugs — rather than Trump’s irresponsible campaign promises — are at the center of the crisis is the biggest lie of all. </p>
<h3 id="IiynQd">Catastrophe keeps us together </h3>
<p id="d1GRwp">What we witnessed Tuesday night was not a president addressing the nation about a crisis, but a president flailing. </p>
<p id="razvbo">Simply put, he can’t even begin to put together a coherent argument for why this funding dispute about fence construction justifies a government shutdown. At the end of the day, there is literally nothing more banal in American political history than the president having a proposal he can’t get the opposition party to agree to. If every policy standoff ended in a government shutdown, we couldn’t have a country at all.</p>
<p id="Y9FizN">If Trump wants his wall, he needs to give Democrats something to make it worth their while to give it to him. Alternatively, if he’s prepared to admit the whole thing is actually ridiculous, then he can walk away. Either way, there is no earthly reason that negotiations can’t simply continue with the government open. <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/1/3/18167030/national-parks-government-shutdown-2018">National parks are filling with trash</a> while vital law enforcement personnel are working without pay for no reason at all — it’s ridiculous and maddening. </p>
<p id="RNWZ2e">So ridiculous that it once again raises the frightening question of how a president who can’t successfully manage peace and prosperity would manage to deal with an actual national crisis. On Monday, congressional Democrats announced a <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/democrats-renew-push-investigate-trump-s-hurricane-maria-response-puerto-n955856">new push for an investigation into Hurricane Maria</a> — the hardest test Trump has thus far faced. What we saw then was that when challenged by a genuinely difficult situation, Trump simply allowed millions of Americans to languish in darkness for months while <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/9/24/17896022/trump-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria-death-toll">nearly 3,000 people died</a>. And judging by Tuesday’s speech, his ability to handle even problems with a low degree of difficulty is getting worse<em>,</em> as his team is increasingly denuded of people with a modicum of honesty or competence. </p>
<p id="JjuHq9">Repudiation at the polls clearly hasn’t caused Trump to rethink anything about this disastrous approach, so we’re now all just left to hope for the best over the next two years. With luck, at some point, we’ll have a functioning government again.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173780/trump-speech-response-crisis-fakeMatthew Yglesias2019-01-09T08:20:57-05:002019-01-09T08:20:57-05:00What’s actually happening at the US-Mexico border, explained
<figure>
<img alt="California-Mexico Border Remains Flashpoint In U.S. Political Immigration Debate" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/XrJISLkEvha2lnsir_mzODafvVo=/462x0:4670x3156/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62812788/1003933548.jpg.1546987831.jpg" />
<figcaption>Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Don’t start with what Trump says about the border. Start with what’s true.</p> <p id="4qKPhC">President Trump wants you, and everyone else in America, to believe that the US-Mexico border isn’t just in trouble but in <em>crisis</em>. </p>
<p id="nOKZeK">The fundamental premise of the government shutdown is that the US-Mexico border is so dangerous to human life that it is worth shutting down whole swaths of the federal government, forcing 800,000 federal employees to miss paychecks, in order to address it. </p>
<p id="99SFHc">And, of course, the way to solve the crisis, Trump argues (in a <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173622/trump-primetime-address-stream-border-wall-time">primetime speech on </a><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173823/president-trump-primetime-tv-address-border-immigration">Tuesday</a><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173622/trump-primetime-address-stream-border-wall-time">,</a> and, as expected, during a trip to the border later this week) is to give the federal government <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18151974/border-wall-trump-steel-slats-shutdown">$5.7 billion</a> to build about 250 more miles of physical barriers.</p>
<p id="ksUcT1">Most of Trump’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174782/trump-speech-immigration-border">claims about the border</a> are fever-dream fantasies that people who actually live there don’t recognize. But some of them have grains of truth: In one respect — the number of children and families entering the US — what we’re seeing is genuinely unprecedented.</p>
<p id="BD666w">Still, a shutdown-worthy crisis, much less a <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18172749/trump-national-emergency-government-shutdown-wall">“national emergency,” </a>is a rare and dire thing. A crisis may require immediate attention and a national debate to determine the best course of action, but it may not require that everything else grind to a halt. And not everything that is going wrong, or less than perfectly, is a crisis.</p>
<p id="PWRqXS">This is the most important thing to remember about the US-Mexico border and the Trump administration’s claims about it. Even if you believe that no one should come to the US without papers, or believe that too many asylum seekers are released into the country — or, conversely, if you believe the Trump administration’s treatment of children and families crossing the border is a national outrage — that isn’t the same as believing it’s a crisis in the way the Trump administration means.</p>
<p id="SK0R47">To make that judgment, don’t start with what Trump says about the border. Start with what’s true.</p>
<h3 id="2R7oyw">1) The border panic has very little to do with what people who live on the border actually see</h3>
<p id="qNpxhL">It’s certainly true that some Americans (though probably not tens of millions) are so worried about gang members and criminals coming over the border to kill them that they are willing to shut down the government over it. But the people who actually live on the border aren’t asking for any of this. </p>
<p id="7zlxwa">Because Trump has worked so tirelessly to reenforce the theme that Republicans will protect you from criminal immigrants while Democrats will abandon you to them, the easiest way to gauge whether border residents agree is to look at election results. </p>
<p id="5GxFLn">The 2018 midterm elections — when Trump, ignoring the advice of other Republicans, hammered relentlessly on border security in the last weeks of the campaign — resulted in Republicans <em>losing </em>two seats along the US-Mexico border, one in Arizona and one in New Mexico. In the current Congress, the only Republican representing a district along the border is Texas Rep. Will Hurd, an outspoken moderate on immigration who says his opposition<em> </em>to a border wall is the reason he won reelection.</p>
<p id="VMKuIn">In fact, as of 2017 (according to the <a href="http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/08/in-republicans-views-of-a-border-wall-proximity-to-mexico-matters/">Pew Research Center</a>), people who lived less than 350 miles from the border were the least likely to support Trump’s wall. In other words, the people supposedly on the front lines of what Trump calls a crisis are those least inclined to support the proposed solution to it.</p>
<p id="6u8iXN">People who live along the border are used to politicians — at both the local and state level — fearmongering about their hometowns. One Texas sheriff spoke out in 2014 to discourage politicians in his state government from hyping the border threat too much — they appreciated the extra money <a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/border-lawman-says-texas-politicians-pipe/">but worried it would hurt their tourism industry</a>. “A lot of tourists will call up to my office and say, ‘Is it safe out there?’” the sheriff, Ronny Dodson, told Chris Hooks at the time. “We’ll ask where they’re coming from. They’ll say ‘Houston.’ We’ll say, hurry up and get out of there! It’s safer here than where you’re coming from.”</p>
<p id="KZpPkc">The political rhetoric is feeding real fear — among people who live far from the border. But people who live closer to it simply don’t identify with that. That’s an important perspective to keep in mind in regards to not only Trump’s claims about the lawlessness of the border, but also how the American people see this as a crisis someone needs to step in to solve.</p>
<h3 id="wG8TFD">2) The US has more than 600 miles of border barriers — and 20-plus years of uninterrupted buildup</h3>
<p id="YmjVPv">The US has been increasing security on its southern border since the 1990s. (Trump’s attorney general nominee William Barr engaged in some of this buildup the last time he was AG, under George H.W. Bush.)</p>
<p id="uDKXWx">Border Patrol has expanded radically. Wave after wave of surveillance projects have been thrown at the border in the hopes of spotting every person or thing coming over. And across 650 miles of the border, even before Trump got into office, there was some form of physical barrier — from Vietnam-surplus landing mats to the steel bollards, or “slats,” Trump now favors for his wall as well.</p>
<aside id="HzOLlg"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"How Donald Trump could actually build the wall — and who would pay the price","url":"https://www.vox.com/2017/5/23/15379648/trump-wall-border-mexico"},{"title":"The border wall fight at the center of the government shutdown, explained","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18151974/border-wall-trump-steel-slats-shutdown"},{"title":"Here’s the offer Trump is making to Democrats to end the shutdown","url":"https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18171913/shutdown-trump-speech-wall-funding"}]}'></div></aside><p id="7aPocB">Physical border barriers first came into use in urban areas, like San Diego and El Paso, where it was hard for Border Patrol agents to spot and catch people who crossed without papers. They’ve since <a href="https://www.vox.com/2017/5/23/15379648/trump-wall-border-mexico">expanded to other areas</a> where large numbers of people might cross in an effort to deter easy crossings. </p>
<p id="bGFCdO">Some activists and progressives refer to the buildup at the border as a “militarization,” and there’s something to that — living on the border means being subject to roadside checkpoints, surveillance, and (sometimes) a fence through your backyard. Before Trump, both Democrats and Republicans were eager to increase border security at the drop of a hat. The effect (along with the related phenomena of violence on the Mexican<em> </em>side of the border) has been a transformation of border communities from cross-border exchanges to citadels.</p>
<p id="JmxksF">When he was running for president, Trump had a ready rebuttal to this: He wasn’t just talking about a fence, but a real, honest-to-goodness wall. But after two years of actually being president, and having an administration that knows what’s feasible to construct and what Border Patrol agents actually prefer, his administration is exclusively building barriers out of steel bollards — the construction style that was the gold standard for barrier construction even before Trump. </p>
<p id="Z2cZNk">Trump can continue to call it a “steel wall,” but what his administration is really proposing is updating and expanding an existing system of barriers, not creating a thing that hasn’t been there before. </p>
<h3 id="5Ki73V">3) In historical context, illegal border crossings are way down</h3>
<p id="21XYrM">The federal government doesn’t try to estimate how many people successfully cross into the US without papers, undetected. What it does — and has done for more than half a century — is use the number of migrants its agents <em>catch</em> trying to enter the US between ports of entry as a proxy for how many, overall, must be trying to get through.</p>
<p id="j9ylgv">By that measure, the security of the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018 (which ended on September 30 of last year) was comparable to the early 1970s.</p>
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<p id="1CAOQJ">Unauthorized migration to the US was already on the decline before the Great Recession — probably in part because the US government started formally deporting people instead of simply turning them back, making it harder for someone to try to enter the US several times in a single year. But the recession all but killed it.</p>
<p id="tpmcgs">The Trump administration doesn’t present things that way. It talks about patterns of the past decade (where crossings have been roughly comparable) or simply compares 2017 to 2018. That makes 2018 seem like an alarming increase. But the reality is that 2017 was an abnormally slow year for border crossings — in part, researchers suspect, because the fear of a Trump presidency delayed some people from taking the trip.</p>
<p id="sq8XQq">Since numbers started ticking back up in early 2018, the Trump administration has been in a near-constant state of panic over the border. It’s the result of a bad baseline — and unreasonable expectations.</p>
<h3 id="iA1SCQ">4) We are seeing unprecedented numbers of families<em> </em>and children<em> </em>coming to the US without papers</h3>
<p id="17OSCN">Just as important as the change in how <em>many </em>people are crossing into the US between ports of entry is <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/10/23/18014998/families-border-asylum-caravan">a change in <em>who </em>is doing it</a>.</p>
<p id="UmiXLo">Over the past several years, adults traveling with children — and children traveling alone — have made up an ever-increasing share of people apprehended at the border. (Often, “apprehended” means the migrants seek out a Border Patrol agent and turn themselves in to ask for asylum.) </p>
<p id="kBHmz7">The government has only been keeping separate statistics on apprehensions of families and children since 2012. The numbers we’ve seen in the past few months are a record for that (brief) period — even outpacing the peak of the “border crisis” in June 2014. </p>
<p id="uiMvpC">And while it might be hard to imagine that more families and children are coming to the US now than were in 2000 — when overall apprehensions were four times greater — experts say that’s exactly what’s happened. A 2017 report from the government’s <a href="https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/17_0914_estimates-of-border-security.pdf">Office of Immigration Statistics </a>estimated that children and families made up less than 2 percent of border crossers during the 2003-2008 period. For the past few months, they’ve made up more than <em>half </em>of all apprehensions.</p>
<p id="hNNvDh">There are multiple reasons for this. The collapse of the unauthorized labor influx incentivized smugglers to find new markets. And they had some ready new markets in the people of the Northern Triangle of Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras), who were desperate to leave gang violence and poverty. Meanwhile, adults who had already settled in the US wanted to bring the children of their family to live with them. </p>
<p id="NUWIfn">The result isn’t just that more of the people who are<em> </em>coming are children and families, but that, by the numbers, more children and families are coming than ever before. More than 150,000 children or family members were apprehended by Border Patrol in fiscal year 2018. That’s nearly 10 percent of the <em>overall </em>apprehensions in 2000 — and we have no reason to believe that children and families actually made up 10 percent of what used to be a migration of single adults.</p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Immigrant Caravan Members Continue To Gather At U.S.-Mexico Border" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/hof8BwUJ4so-B9ZRZwGAhvQm74U=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13677589/1068994044.jpg.jpg">
<cite>John Moore/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Many asylum seekers like this woman and her son have been held in Tijuana while waiting to be allowed to enter the US legally to claim asylum. Thousands of others have crossed illegally because they are unable to wait.</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3 id="xSfCeZ">5) The Trump administration is tragically unequipped to deal with the families and children coming in now</h3>
<p id="b659PT">The US’s border infrastructure isn’t designed to take care of families or children. But that’s the role it’s been forced into. And the results have been tragic. </p>
<p id="4clynB">Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Kevin McAleenan <a href="https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4768233/cpb-chief-warns-border-facilities-equipped-handle-families-children">told the Senate Judiciary Committee</a> in December that “the infrastructure is not compatible with the reality” of who is getting apprehended — essentially admitting that his agency was ill-equipped to take care of the people currently entering the US.</p>
<p id="KIKGQO">Border Patrol doesn’t even have the standards for detention conditions that Immigration and Customs Enforcement has — because Border Patrol isn’t supposed to be detaining anyone<em> </em>for any meaningful amount of time. The problem, of course, is that the times families are being held by Border Patrol for days on end are the times when the rest of the system is already overloaded and in crisis.</p>
<p id="iaJGQI">Before December 2018, it had been a decade since any child had died in the custody of Border Patrol (or its partner division, the Customs and Border Protection Office of Field Operations, which deals with ports of entry). In December 2018, two children did.</p>
<p id="5Xbd5f">The death of <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/18/18144434/child-died-jakelin-caal-seven-border-patrol">Jakelin Caal Maquin</a> on December 8 has raised questions about Border Patrol’s responsiveness to medical needs and its capacity to deal with medical emergencies in remote areas of the border. The death of Felipe Alonzo-Gomez <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/26/us/felipe-alonzo-gomez-customs-border-patrol.html">on Christmas Day</a> has raised separate questions: about why a child was held in Border Patrol custody for six days before ICE was even asked to find a spot for him and his father, and about why he was shuffled between four facilities — including being taken from the hospital to a cramped highway checkpoint.</p>
<p id="Z0If5U">When it can no longer hold so many families in custody, the federal government has sometimes <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/27/18157515/immigrant-families-detention-border-children-deaths-ice">turned them out en masse without warning</a> — as ICE did to several hundred families in El Paso before Christmas — leaving them in an unfamiliar country with a tight deadline to make it to their next immigration check-in. </p>
<p id="WW76E6">At ports of entry, where it is legal to cross without papers if you wish to seek asylum in the US, some officials have told families to wait, or turned them away to come back later, in a semi-official policy known as <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/28/18089048/border-asylum-trump-metering-legally-ports">“metering.”</a> Metering has increased the incentive for families to cross between ports of entry illegally.</p>
<aside id="VGn6ZB"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"The US has made migrants at the border wait months to apply for asylum. Now the dam is breaking.","url":"https://www.vox.com/2018/11/28/18089048/border-asylum-trump-metering-legally-ports"}]}'></div></aside><p id="8ZTbfC">Democrats and progressives accuse the Trump administration of boxing itself into this resource crunch by detaining massive numbers of people (including families) to begin with, and argue that Border Patrol agents would be less overwhelmed if there were more capacity and willingness to process asylum seekers legally at ports. The administration, for its part, argues it’s doing everything it can and simply doesn’t have the resources it needs to provide humane care.</p>
<h3 id="VkVd58">6) The “problem” of asylum seekers isn’t something that a wall can fix</h3>
<p id="MrfUf6">It might be fair to call the current situation at the border a “humanitarian crisis.” But it isn’t why Trump shut down the government. And it isn’t something a wall can fix.</p>
<p id="o5pPxX">The point of walls is to prevent people from crossing into the US undetected. That’s not what most of the families and children who are crossing are doing. They’re turning themselves in to the nearest border agent they see on the US side.</p>
<p id="x1jpnM">Not all of them, but a large share, are seeking asylum — seeking to live legally in the US. That’s something they have a legal right to do even if they crossed illegally — and it’s something they could do at a port of entry even if there were a wall across the entire border.</p>
<p id="ZkZuuJ">The Trump administration’s specific problem with the influx of asylum seekers isn’t that it isn’t catching them — it’s that it can’t quickly deport them, and can’t detain them for the entire time until they are deported, because of extra legal protections for asylum seekers as well as for children and families. (The administration calls these “loopholes” that create a policy of “catch and release.”)</p>
<p id="lHabT5">To Trump and his administration, “catch and release” is a crisis — because it means that large numbers of people are released into the US on their own recognizance, many of whom don’t make it all the way through the asylum process or ultimately have their asylum claims denied.</p>
<p id="Lkw9t4">The administration has long agitated to overhaul the law to close these “loopholes,” over strident objection from Democrats. Whether “catch and release” is a crisis is a matter of discussion. Whether a wall would address it is not. </p>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="Number Of Immigrant Asylum Seekers Surges In Texas’ Rio Grande Valley" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/jnooaJ0nHfSx4pnOkHW0gq5RuVM=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13677599/1056129264.jpg.jpg">
<cite>John Moore/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Children seeking asylum, like this girl, are released by immigration agents — in what Trump calls “catch and release.”</figcaption>
</figure>
<h3 id="2iNzSd">7) There is no evidence of a terrorist crisis at the border</h3>
<p id="H5GTk6">The Trump administration’s efforts to claim that thousands of terrorists or potential terrorists have tried to cross into the US have been <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174294/trump-border-wall-terrorism-shutdown-speech">roundly mocked and debunked</a>. NBC found that a total of six known or suspected terrorists were caught trying to come to the US in the first six months of 2018.</p>
<aside id="Uu41Go"><div data-anthem-component="readmore" data-anthem-component-data='{"stories":[{"title":"DHS Secretary Nielsen pushes string of misleading claims in Twitter thread about border “threat”","url":"https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173556/dhs-secretary-nielsen-twitter-thread-border-misleading-claims"},{"title":"“It simply isn’t true”: former top terrorism official says there’s no terror crisis at the border","url":"https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174294/trump-border-wall-terrorism-shutdown-speech"}]}'></div></aside><p id="tINNaa">To a certain extent, the administration is (either carelessly or mendaciously) conflating “known or suspected terrorists” with “special interest aliens” — migrants who automatically get additional screening because of factors they might have in common with terrorists. One of those factors is “travel patterns” — in other words, being a “special interest alien” might just mean that one visited for, or is from, a country that the US considers friendly to terrorism. Even the Trump administration, which has banned nationals of several countries for similar reasons, isn’t claiming that everyone<em> </em>affected by the “travel ban” is a terrorist.</p>
<p id="JpAiC3">But the debunking of the administration’s specific numbers about terrorism at the border kind of misses a bigger point: that this whole conversation is about the typical vetting and screening process people undergo to enter the United States,<em> </em>and the number of people “caught” are the ones successfully identified.</p>
<p id="1scsSk">There is no reason to assume that catching more potential “terrorists” means that more of them are slipping through. To the contrary, improving a vetting system should mean that (in theory) more people are being caught because <em>fewer </em>are slipping through. </p>
<p id="i0s3Nf">On a very broad scale, it is true that perfect antiterrorism defense would require literally zero unauthorized border crossings. But that’s not the same as arguing that there is an imminent terrorist threat. And the way the administration talks about terrorism just isn’t related to the things it wants to do.</p>
<h3 id="z9ppsD">8) The border drug issue is about insufficient screening at ports</h3>
<p id="iMvCiq">Similarly, Trump likes to characterize the border as a haven for drug smuggling, going on flights of fancy about drones or “sacks of drugs” hitting agents on the head.</p>
<p id="oA0XOb">It’s true that a lot of drugs consumed in the US come in via the border with Mexico. But the majority of them, consistently, come into the US at ports of entry<em> — </em>official border crossings. A wall would have no impact.</p>
<p id="b8RXoY">The Trump administration is actually working to address this problem, by scanning more vehicles at ports. In fact, its official offer to Congress to end the shutdown included $675 million for vehicle-scanning technology — though Vice President Pence said the request came from Democrats in Congress. </p>
<p id="KaTyO0">Building a wall probably wouldn’t cause <em>more </em>drugs to flow into the US. But that doesn’t mean building one is a national imperative.</p>
<h3 id="s44uvh">9) Walls work — to direct people to cross somewhere else along the border</h3>
<figure class="e-image">
<img alt="President Trump’s Proposed Border Wall Prototypes Sit Along Mexico / U.S. Border" data-mask-text="false" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/eN4sL9N-tx5CsK_S8C-KCFifZmA=/800x0/filters:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/13677601/930356616.jpg.jpg">
<cite>Mario Tama/Getty Images</cite>
<figcaption>Trump built a series of prototype “walls” — only to decide to stick with the steel bollard style that was used before he came into office.</figcaption>
</figure>
<p id="KxfM2E">The Trump administration likes to cite statistics from areas where barriers have already been built, followed by a drop in apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants.</p>
<p id="XvJ9y0">That’s how it’s supposed to work — because the wall was designed to get them to go somewhere else<em>. </em></p>
<p id="IC5euv">The purpose of physical barriers is what border agents call “funneling” — pushing people to cross where they can be more easily apprehended by Border Patrol. </p>
<p id="BZkpAs">That funneling can be helpful to ensure that Border Patrol agents catch as many people as possible, or to focus them on tracking more sophisticated criminal efforts.</p>
<p id="uBFldt">But that doesn’t mean that you can reduce the overall number of people coming into the US by building as much wall as possible.</p>
<p id="gcXf0o">There is some evidence that previous border security buildups have succeeded in deterring some migrants from coming to the US over the past decade (though some scholars argue that the Great Recession played a bigger role). There’s even more evidence that it’s deterred people who were caught once from trying to cross a second time. </p>
<p id="A0h4r4">But it’s not clear whether that’s an indication that the US could be even more effective with even more enforcement, or that the government has <em>already</em> picked the low-hanging fruit.</p>
<p id="rbXj0Z">The people still coming to the US without papers are, increasingly, what are sometimes referred to as “non-impactables” — people who can’t be affected by the harshness of the typical immigration enforcement regime. Children and families from Central America are coming despite a journey that is often dangerous, and coming despite the possibility that they might not make it. It’s hard to deter people who are already so desperate.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lyingDara Lind2019-01-09T08:15:00-05:002019-01-09T08:15:00-05:00Donald Trump knows his primetime speech and border trip are totally pointless
<figure>
<img alt="" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/vCiMS4WjEvFhtR31sJQYiJbugoc=/219x0:3718x2624/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62814120/AP_19009075103157.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>President Donald Trump gives a primetime address about border security. | AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The New York Times has a Trump speech anecdote to make you laugh, cry.</p> <p id="IPCnlj"><a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174773/trump-speech-fact-check-immigration">President Trump’s speech to the nation</a> Tuesday was short, his delivery was bland, and he didn’t really say anything he hadn’t said before <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lying">in defense of his Mexican border wall</a>. It certainly didn’t seem likely to change the debate over the government shutdown, given <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174543/reaction-trump-immigration-speech-democratic-response-tonight">how the Democrats responded</a>.</p>
<p id="cmttuH">Even Trump apparently knew how pointless this whole exercise was. The New York Times’s Peter Baker, chronicler of presidents, dropped this gem into an article not long after Trump finished talking: The president didn’t even want to give that speech and he doesn’t want to go on his upcoming trip to the Mexican border. He thinks it’s useless.</p>
<p id="rE9CcJ"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/08/us/politics/donald-trump-speech.html">From Baker</a> (emphasis mine):</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="ojCG3x">Privately, Mr. Trump dismissed his own new strategy as pointless. In an off-the-record lunch with television anchors hours before the address, he made clear in blunt terms that he was not inclined to give the speech or go to Texas, but was talked into it by advisers, according to two people briefed on the discussion who asked not to be identified sharing details.</p>
<p id="ZZjmth"><strong>“It’s not going to change a damn thing, but I’m still doing it,” Mr. Trump said of the trip to the border, according to one of the people, who was in the room. The border trip was just a photo opportunity, he said. “But,” he added, gesturing at his communications aides, Bill Shine, Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, “these people behind you say it’s worth it.”</strong></p>
</blockquote>
<p id="7XcEQF">Axios’s Jonathan Swan <a href="https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1082961047575805953">confirmed</a> the Times’s reporting.</p>
<p id="0Lqgpd">But the trip to the border is still on, as of Wednesday morning. First, Democratic and Republican leaders are heading to the White House on Wednesday for yet another meeting about how to end the shutdown. The impasse is in its third week, with thousands of federal workers about to miss their paychecks in the coming days.</p>
<p id="Kpbnzl"></p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174850/donald-trump-immigration-speech-reaction-pointlessDylan Scott2019-01-09T08:10:48-05:002019-01-09T08:10:48-05:00An underwhelming speech by a president without a plan
<figure>
<img alt="People Gather To Watch President Trump’s Address On Border Security At An American Legion Post In Encinitas, California" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/S-ST790QZ_tnx3Zrrzbn6Su0ajE=/323x0:4920x3448/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62813933/1079458848.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Sandy Huffaker/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If Trump wanted his wall, he’d offer Democrats something in return.</p> <p id="0NCixr">The measure of a politician’s commitment to a policy isn’t how often he asks for it but how much he’s willing to trade away to get it. By that measure, President Trump has never seemed committed to the border wall. </p>
<p id="yJE4Z9">When Republicans controlled Congress, Democrats <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/1/21/16916344/john-kelly-trump-white-house-daca-senate-graham-durbin">offered Trump a deal</a>: the wall for legalizing the young undocumented immigrants known as DREAMers. “I’ll take a bucket, take bricks, and I’ll start building it myself,” said Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-IL). “We will dirty our hands in order for the DREAMers to have a clean future in America. Then why haven’t we settled this?” They didn’t settle it because Trump refused the deal. </p>
<p id="Cz4l43">Now that Democrats control Congress, Trump has offered them exactly nothing in exchange for the wall. In his Tuesday night speech, he didn’t make a new offer, or try to revive Democrats’ old offer. This isn’t the behavior of a president intent on finding the necessary votes for a policy he cares about, much less solving what he calls a humanitarian and national security crisis on the border. </p>
<p id="v63OD8">Trump doesn’t care about the wall. He cares about being seen fighting for the wall. From that perspective — Trump’s perspective — Tuesday night’s speech was a success. His base saw him fighting for them. And that may have been all he really wanted.</p>
<p id="KywVO0">Trump cares about being seen as a winner, which he seems to believe is in tension with compromising. His sense of negotiations is fundamentally zero-sum: One side has to lose and one side has to win. If Trump gives Democrats anything they can present as a win, he will look like a loser. As such, he can’t give them the concessions that might get him the wall because what he’d be giving up — his image as a winner — is more important to him than the policy he’d be gaining. </p>
<p id="a9QFk1">If all this sounds ridiculous, well, it is. This is the presidency as reality television, not as governance. The problem is that Trump isn’t simply spinning up some conflict for sweeps week: 800,000 federal workers, and millions more who depend on their work, are pawns in Trump’s display of presidential ego. </p>
<p id="oecb75">House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer aren’t going to win any points for presentation — the single-podium setup was one of the more awkward political visuals in recent memory — but they clearly had the winning argument. They’re willing to reopen the government and keep negotiating over border security. Trump isn’t. </p>
<p id="yHT7LN">“There’s an obvious solution: Separate the shutdown from arguments over border security,” Schumer said. “There is bipartisan legislation supported by Democrats and Republicans to reopen government while allowing debate over border security to continue. There is no excuse for hurting millions of Americans over a policy difference.”</p>
<p id="EzHS56">Even before tonight’s speeches, voters blamed Trump and Republicans for the shutdown, by a <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/08/poll-voters-blame-trump-gop-for-shutdown-1088207">margin</a> of 52 to 33 percent. As the damage mounts, and Democrats keep sending Trump bills to reopen the government, those numbers will continue to climb.</p>
<p id="IcVIkE">What nervous congressional Republicans needed to see from Trump tonight was that he had either an argument that could turn public opinion or an endgame to break the shutdown stalemate. But all he had, all he’s ever had, is the same old talking points. </p>
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18174776/trump-speech-border-wall-immigration-democrats-reactionEzra Klein2019-01-09T07:52:18-05:002019-01-09T07:52:18-05:00“Immigrants are coming over the border to kill you” is the only speech Trump knows how to give
<figure>
<img alt="President Trump Addresses The Nation On Border Security From The Oval Office" src="https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/9gPnCJ3t2nqbMCFtFaCF6pfWE8g=/0x1193:2644x3176/1310x983/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/62814168/1079459650.jpg.0.jpg" />
<figcaption>Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most politicians know how to strike more than one note. Trump does not.</p> <p id="7OnGGQ">In retrospect, it’s unclear why America should have expected anything from President Trump’s <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/8/18173823/president-trump-primetime-tv-address-border-immigration">Tuesday night primetime speech </a><em>other </em>than a rant about how immigrants are coming across the border to kill you.</p>
<p id="2LA8Ib">With the federal government partially closed since December 21, and 800,000 federal employees about to miss a paycheck on Friday, there might have been an expectation that Trump would discuss the shutdown. He might have been expected to make a sustained case for why now was a particularly important time to get <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/12/21/18151974/border-wall-trump-steel-slats-shutdown">$5.7 billion</a> to build 250 miles of physical barriers along the US-Mexico border. </p>
<p id="M6bf5g">Trump glancingly covered those talking points: The border is both a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lying">national security crisis</a> (because of spurious arguments about drugs, smugglers, and terrorism) and a <a href="https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18173721/trump-border-facts-truth-speech-lying">humanitarian crisis </a>(because of the genuinely unprecedented <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/12/27/18157515/immigrant-families-detention-border-children-deaths-ice">influx of children and families</a> into the US). He very briefly talked through his administration’s demands for reopening the government — though he characterized them as coming from “law enforcement officials and border agents.”</p>
<p id="lJMTtz">But mostly, he gave the exact same speech he always gives: that immigrants are coming across the border to kill you.</p>
<p id="tL9jKl">This is not really an exaggeration. I have been following Trump’s immigration rhetoric since he came down the escalator at Trump Tower, and the relentlessness with which he hits this particular narrow subgenre of anti-immigrant panic is noteworthy.</p>
<p id="NvjBzb">This isn’t just a matter of Trump going back to a stump speech, or the riffs he knows the audience loves. The idea that immigrants are coming to kill you is a persistent motif in his scripted speeches — the formal addresses that are supposed to be the hallmarks of statesmanship, the moments when other presidents “truly become president of the United States.”</p>
<p id="HKCy8L">Most politicians have more than one way to talk about the enemies of the American people. Most have more than one way to express sympathy for Americans going through hard times. Most have more than one way to assure America that they can keep its people safe. Trump only has the one note, and he has played it literally every time he’s been called on to talk like a president. </p>
<p id="tkuaT7">His <a href="http://time.com/3923128/donald-trump-announcement-speech/">campaign launch</a> on June 16, 2015:</p>
<blockquote><p id="7hLHXd">They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.</p></blockquote>
<p id="fP5e6s">His <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/6/13/11925122/trump-orlando-foreign-policy-transcript">response to the Pulse nightclub shooting</a> in June 2016:</p>
<blockquote><p id="a0MGjn">We cannot continue to allow thousands upon thousands of people to pour into our country, many of whom have the same thought process as this savage killer. </p></blockquote>
<p id="kqoLYJ">The speech with which he f<a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974">ormally accepted the Republican Party’s nomination for the presidency,</a> in July 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="EO61Gu">They are being released by the tens of thousands into our communities with no regard for the impact on public safety or resources.</p>
<p id="egRKKp">One such border-crosser was released and made his way to Nebraska. There, he ended the life of an innocent young girl named Sarah Root. She was 21 years-old, and was killed the day after graduating from college with a 4.0 Grade Point Average. Her killer was then released a second time, and he is now a fugitive from the law.</p>
<p id="BJkKPi">I’ve met Sarah’s beautiful family. But to this Administration, their amazing daughter was just one more American life that wasn’t worth protecting. One more child to sacrifice on the altar of open borders.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="YxwK9m">A <a href="https://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-immigration-address-transcript-227614">campaign speech on immigration</a> (billed as a policy address and delivered in primetime) in Phoenix, Arizona, on August 31, 2016:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="Xvpt6Q">Also among the victims of the Obama-Clinton open borders policies was Grant Ronnebeck, a 21 year-old convenience store clerk in Mesa, Arizona. He was murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member previously convicted of burglary who had also been released from Federal Custody.</p>
<p id="Y8wgpM">Another victim is Kate Steinle, gunned down in the Sanctuary City of San Francisco by an illegal immigrant deported five previous times.</p>
<p id="k7PWHE">Then there is the case of 90 year-old Earl Olander, who was brutally beaten and left to bleed to death in his home. The perpetrators were illegal immigrants with criminal records who did not meet the Obama Administration’s priorities for removal.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="sCwdkl">His <a href="https://www.vox.com/a/president-trump-inauguration-speech-transcript-annotations">“American Carnage” inauguration speech</a> (which, in this company, looks pretty tame), January 21, 2017:</p>
<blockquote><p id="yIFMFk">the crime and the gangs and the drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential. This American carnage stops right here and stops right now.</p></blockquote>
<p id="qnoZoO">His <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-joint-address-congress/">speech to a joint session of Congress</a> in February 2017:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="9Bz9Ta">Joining us in the audience tonight are four very brave Americans whose government failed them. Their names are Jamiel Shaw, Susan Oliver, Jenna Oliver, and Jessica Davis.</p>
<p id="UvrBbQ">Jamiel’s 17-year-old son was viciously murdered by an illegal immigrant gang member who had just been released from prison. Jamiel Shaw, Jr. was an incredible young man, with unlimited potential who was getting ready to go to college where he would have excelled as a great college quarterback. But he never got the chance. His father, who is in the audience tonight, has become a very good friend of mine. Jamiel, thank you. Thank you. (Applause.)</p>
<p id="c7sX3J">Also with us are Susan Oliver and Jessica Davis. Their husbands, Deputy Sheriff Danny Oliver and Detective Michael Davis, were slain in the line of duty in California. They were pillars of their community. These brave men were viciously gunned down by an illegal immigrant with a criminal record and two prior deportations. Should have never been in our country.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="xxR5on">A speech to law enforcement in July 2017, in which he <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/28/16059486/trump-speech-police-hand">casually ad-libbed an endorsement of police brutality</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="UIjaLB">MS-13 gang members have brutally murdered 17 beautiful, young lives in this area on Long Island alone. Think of it. They butcher those little girls. They kidnap, they extort, they rape and they rob. They prey on children. They shouldn’t be here. They stomp on their victims. They beat them with clubs. They slash them with machetes, and they stab them with knives. They have transformed peaceful parks and beautiful, quiet neighborhoods into bloodstained killing fields. They’re animals.</p>
<p id="j2YIU6">We cannot tolerate as a society the spilling of innocent, young, wonderful, vibrant people — sons and daughters, even husbands and wives. We cannot accept this violence one day more. </p>
</blockquote>
<p id="xwmuNv">His <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/president-donald-j-trumps-state-union-address/">State of the Union address</a> in January 2018:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="tyE7YB">Here tonight are two fathers and two mothers: Evelyn Rodriguez, Freddy Cuevas, Elizabeth Alvarado, and Robert Mickens. Their two teenage daughters — Kayla Cuevas and Nisa Mickens — were close friends on Long Island. But in September 2016, on the eve of Nisa’s 16th Birthday, neither of them came home. These two precious girls were brutally murdered while walking together in their hometown. Six members of the savage gang MS-13 have been charged with Kayla and Nisa’s murders. Many of these gang members took advantage of glaring loopholes in our laws to enter the country as unaccompanied alien minors ‑- and wound up in Kayla and Nisa’s high school.</p>
<p id="bgxbpx">Evelyn, Elizabeth, Freddy, and Robert: Tonight, everyone in this chamber is praying for you. Everyone in America is grieving for you. And 320 million hearts are breaking for you. We cannot imagine the depth of your sorrow, but we can make sure that other families never have to endure this pain.</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="ROE2h6">His speech to the <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-conservative-political-action-conference-2/">Conservative Political Action Conference</a> in February 2018:</p>
<blockquote><p id="jLN5P8"> These are animals. They cut people. They cut them. They cut them up in little pieces and they want them to suffer. And we take them into our country because our immigration laws are so bad. And when we catch them — it’s called catch-and-release — we have to, by law, catch them and then release them. Catch-and-release. And I can’t get the Democrats — and nobody has been able to for years — to approve common-sense measures that, when we catch these animal-killers, we can lock them up and throw away the keys. </p></blockquote>
<p id="HzVuUj">A speech given at an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-members-angel-families-immigration/">event held with the “Angel Moms”</a> — a group of parents whose children were killed by unauthorized immigrants, featuring some of the parents highlighted in previous speeches — in June 2018, during the peak of the family separation crisis, with the message that the press should pay attention to families “permanently separated” because one of them was killed by an immigrant:</p>
<blockquote><p id="nWzf0y">No major networks sent cameras to their homes or displayed the images of their incredible loved ones across the nightly news. They don’t do that. They don’t talk about the death and destruction caused by people that shouldn’t be here, people that will continuously get into trouble and do bad things.</p></blockquote>
<p id="r6LdVY">A <a href="https://www.vox.com/2018/11/1/18053638/cnn-carried-donald-trump-immigration-white-house">speech on the eve of the midterm elections</a> — also billed as a policy address and thus covered (at least initially) by multiple TV networks, but which, compared to Tuesday’s, is actually pretty heavy on policy — given November 1, 2018:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="tJL0My">At this very moment, large, well-organized caravans of migrants are marching towards our southern border. Some people call it an “invasion.” It’s like an invasion. They have violently overrun the Mexican border. You saw that two days ago. These are tough people, in many cases. A lot of young men, strong men. And a lot of men that maybe we don’t want in our country. But again, we’ll find that out through the legal process.</p>
<p id="FTS1an">But they’ve overrun the Mexican police, and they’ve overrun and hurt badly Mexican soldiers. </p>
</blockquote>
<p id="iiIaYY">And finally, Tuesday night, during his first primetime address to the nation from the Oval Office, carried by all major networks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p id="8TjdDo">Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders. In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered, and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading, and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl.</p>
<p id="Yxie1o">Over the last several years, I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls.</p>
<p id="ihPouO">How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?</p>
<p id="u0FeFq">To those who refuse to compromise in the name of border security, I would ask: Imagine if it was your child, your husband, or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken?</p>
</blockquote>
<p id="ahpOmZ">I know I’m forgetting some, because there have been three and a half years of this, and honestly, I haven’t watched every scripted Trump speech. But earlier Tuesday, when I posted a thread about the Immigrants Are Coming Across the Border to Kill You motif (abbreviated IACATBTKY for Twitter), it’s not because I had any advance notice of the content — it’s because, at this point, it’s deeply predictable. </p>
<p id="CMwIlf">The Trump administration was already playing fast and loose with the facts when it made the case in advance of the president’s speech that the current situation on the US-Mexico border was such a crisis that it merited a partial government shutdown to resolve. Trump himself, though, didn’t even try. His central argument is that there is a crisis of immigrants coming across the border to kill you — the exact same argument he has been making, and the exact same supposed crisis, for three and a half years. </p>
<p id="m4hKRy">The question he didn’t answer: Why on earth, if the crisis has been that bad for so long, is now the moment of exceptional emergency?</p>
https://www.vox.com/2019/1/8/18174782/trump-speech-immigration-borderDara Lind