Tonight—on a day that will live in infamy—our national television networks will allow the President of the United States to use their airwaves to inject a toxic dose of purposeful misinformation into the American bloodstream.
The news media, which gave Donald Trump five billion dollars in free publicity during the 2016 campaign, will once again surrender their responsibility to accurately report the news in order to engineer another five-billion-dollar boondoggle for Trump. This time the money will be used to enable Trump to build a physical barrier on our southern border—a barrier that began life as a remedial device to remind Trump to focus on immigration during his campaign appearances, that after three years of discussion no one can describe and for which there is no plan, that no one outside of the White House has asked for, that no one believes will work, that was supposed to be paid for by Mexico, and whose only real aspect is its power as a racist symbol.
Trump’s speech will reportedly be written by Stephen Miller, a man so comfortable with deceit that he is not shy about appearing on television with fake hair sprayed onto his bald skull.
Trump will claim that we have a national emergency on the border with Mexico. He will tell us that vast hordes of illegal aliens are overwhelming our border security system. Trump will insist that many, if not most, of these illegal immigrants are terrorists and hardened criminals. He will paint a terrifying image of an America that is on the verge of being overrun by a brown plague. To do so, he will willfully spout fake data, conflate different categories and different borders, and cite nonexistent experts. He will insist that we cannot secure the border with Mexico unless we build a wall. Trump will blame the Democrats in Congress for shutting down the government. He will threaten that he has the ability—and the willingness—to bypass Congress and get his barrier built by declaring a national emergency, commandeering money allocated to other projects, and ordering the U.S. military to build it. He will remind the country that he was elected on the promise of building a border wall, and will claim that the vast majority of Americans expect him to follow through on that commitment. And Trump will introduce what for him will be a new theme—that the lack of a border barrier has created a vast humanitarian crisis.
None of this is true.
The number of people crossing the Mexican border illegally has been shrinking for decades. The vast majority of people seeking entry to this country through the southern border are refugees fleeing real physical danger in their home countries. A third of them are children. Most illegal aliens in this country are here because they overstayed their visas. Statistics show that illegal aliens are less prone to criminal behavior than native Americans, that most of the drugs that enter our country from Mexico are smuggled through official ports of entry, and that most illegal aliens use airports to enter this country.
No experts in security or immigration, including our Border Patrol professionals, believe that a barrier along the entire border is needed or will work. They have requested not a barrier but better technology and more manpower. None of the Republican leaders from the states bordering Mexico support the wall.
Trump and his spokespeople have recently made false claims that nearly 4,000 “terrorists” tried to cross the southern border this year. Government data shows that the number was six.
Trump himself is the sole cause of the government shutdown. His party controlled both Houses of Congress for two years, but Republicans never made building a wall a legislative priority. Trump signed a budget bill last year that did not include funding for a border wall. He turned down an offer of $25 billion for the wall from Chuck Schumer a few months later. Two weeks ago Trump told Congressional Republicans that he would sign a funding bill that included $1.6 billion for border security but no wall funding, and then, after they passed it, he reneged on that promise when Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham attacked him for caving on his signature campaign promise.
It is not at all clear that Trump could legally use a national emergency to fund and build the wall. Any attempt to do so will be met by immediate legal challenges that will take months to resolve.
Polls show that the majority of Americans do not support the construction of a border wall and blame Trump for the government shutdown. Trump made immigration his focus during the 2016 midterms, and the result was a decisive repudiation by the voters and a new Democratic majority in the House of Representatives.
Trump’s anticipated announcement that there is an humanitarian crisis on the southern border as well as a security calamity may prove to be the most perverse element in his speech tonight. He’s right. There IS a humanitarian crisis at the border, and it is getting worse by the day. What Trump won’t mention is that this crisis, like the government shutdown, is entirely of his own making.
Trump is not just against illegal immigration. His goal is to halt ALL immigration to this country by people of color. His focus, therefore, is on the southern border. (Most people on the terrorist watch list who try to enter this country do so from Canada. Trump has specifically said that he would welcome more immigrants from Norway.) His strategy is to slow down the processing of asylum requests at legal ports of entry to create a human and bureaucratic log jam; to falsely brand all refugees as rapists, terrorists, and gang members; and to create a phony case for a wall.
The results of this strategy? An unprecedented population of thousands of immigrants housed indefinitely in newly built concentration camps that is growing daily, the separation of immigrant children from their parents, a growing threat of medical epidemics amongst the quarantined migrants, and the deaths of at least two children while in U.S. custody.
So here we are. Our President has responded to his first taste of divided government by shutting down the government. Tonight he will use his bully pulpit to spew a stream of blatant lies from the Oval Office in furtherance of an openly racist agenda. And the media outlets, who understand this sickening reality better than anyone, will offer up the airwaves as the vehicle for this nauseating spectacle.
Our best hope is that Trump’s speech tonight will be no more effective than his countless other stunts and statements in attracting the majority of his fellow citizens to his viciously un-American vision. It may be that Trump will take a header off his imaginary wall and that no amount of racism in this country will be able to put him back together again.
A few days ago I saw a Facebook comment posted by a German immigrant. She said that she supported Trump’s wall because she knew from personal experience how effective the Berlin wall was.
Trump’s biggest con is that his imaginary wall is designed to make America great again by keeping evil people out. The truth is that its purpose is to imprison us in a fearful, xenophobic, white-supremacist, realm—a shithole country.
