President Trump’s primetime TV speech: news and updates

Fact-checkers wandered into false equivalency territory Tuesday night after President Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration and Democrats’ response to it.

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 put it on Twitter: it takes “two to tango.”

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.

The first false premise Trump pushed is that a border wall is needed to stop the flow of drugs into the country:

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?

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.

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.

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.

President Trump’s speech to the nation Tuesday was short, his delivery was bland, and he didn’t really say anything he hadn’t said before in defense of his Mexican border wall. It certainly didn’t seem likely to change the debate over the government shutdown, given how the Democrats responded.

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.

In retrospect, it’s unclear why America should have expected anything from President Trump’s Tuesday night primetime speech other than a rant about how immigrants are coming across the border to kill you.

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 $5.7 billion to build 250 miles of physical barriers along the US-Mexico border.

President Donald Trump had one particular line in his Tuesday night border security address that will likely become fodder for Democratic attack ads in 2020.

“Some have suggested a barrier is immoral,” Trump said. “Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences, and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside but because they love the people on the inside.”

As the government shutdown enters its 18th day over a manufactured crisis at the border, President Donald Trump will address the nation during primetime television on Tuesday evening.

The address will air at 9 pm Eastern time and be broadcast on multiple major networks, including NBC, ABC, CBS, PBS, and Fox’s broadcast networks; and cable outlets such as CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. C-SPAN will also carry the speech.

As television networks are set to air President Donald Trump’s first Oval Office address on immigration — a subject he has been known to lie about profusely — Democratic leaders are calling for equal airtime.

“Now that the television networks have decided to air the President’s address, which if his past statements are any indication will be full of malice and misinformation, Democrats must immediately be given equal airtime,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in a joint statement.