[Editor’s note: Donald Trump’s prodigious number of lies; his ignorance of policies, as well as the positions and interests of others (allies and opponents), which cripple his ability to strategize – exposing the foundational lie that he is a good dealmaker; his self-serving corruption; his inability and disinterest in the Constitution, the law, democratic institutions, or the broader public interest; and his deliberate efforts to sow disunity in the country – all of this is well known and, perhaps, is more significant than his bonkers press conference declaring a national emergency or non sequiturs uttered at his rally in El Paso. But, from time to time, when I watch him, I am gobsmacked by what I’ve witnessed, as this post relates.]
After watching a few minutes of Donald Trump’s meandering, bewildering stream of nouns and verbs at the beginning of his press conference this morning, I remarked that if the text were a movie script featuring a U.S. president, the context would be a situation where the character’s mind had been damaged through catastrophic accident, illness, or attack by an enemy of the state.
Earlier this week, I happened to see a brief clip of his rally in El Paso. He has been spreading lies about the border – of drugs, human trafficking, and criminal gangs – to justify building his wall. Below is an excerpt, which followed a paragraph where he remarked on caravans, bad laws, asylum seekers, the backlog of immigration cases, and “the system put in place by really dumb people or people that did not have the best interest of our country at heart.”
In this passage he essentially appeals to the crowd to adjudicate the veracity of the stories he has been telling about El Paso, pre-wall, having one of the highest crime rates in the country. Through their enthusiastic applause and cheers, he finds vindication – proof of the claims, unmoored to any basis in fact, that he is spreading.
I have provided the text, which leaves out the clapping and shouting that follow many of his remarks. You can watch and listen at the link beginning at 00:54:15.
“And there’s no better place to talk about border security, whether they like it or not. Because I’ve been hearing a lot of things. ‘Oh, the wall didn’t make that much of a difference.’ You know where it made a difference? Right here in El Paso.
And I’ve been watching, where they’ve been trying to say, ‘Oh, the wall didn’t make that much’ – You take a look at what they did with their past crimes and how they made them from serious to much less serious. You take a look at what the real system is. I spoke to people who have been here a long time. They said when that wall went up, it’s a whole different ballgame. I mean, is that a correct statement?
A whole different ballgame.
I’ll give you another example. And I don’t care if a mayor is a Republican or a Democrat. They’re full of crap when they say it hasn’t made a big difference.
I heard the same thing from the fake news. They said, ‘Oh, crime actually stayed the same.’ Didn’t stay the same! It went way down. And look at what they did to their past crimes and look at how they reported those past crimes. Went way, way down.
These people. You know, you’d think they’d want to get to the bottom of a problem and solve a problem, not try and pull the wool over everybody’s eyes. So, for those few people who are out there on television saying, ‘Oh, it didn’t make too much of a difference ’– It made a tremendous difference.
People from El Paso, am I right?”
Affirming applause. Which has taken the place of facts, evidence, and truth.
Today at the White House, Trump recalled that scene (at 6:33):
“When you look and when you listen to politicians, in particular certain Democrats, they say it all comes through the port of entry. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie. They say walls don’t work. Walls work a hundred percent. Whether it’s El Paso – I really was smiling because the other night I was in El Paso. We had a tremendous crowd and – tremendous crowd – and I asked the people, many of whom were from El Paso, but they came from all over Texas. And I asked them, I said, ‘Let me ask you the – as a crowd, when the wall went up, was it better?’ You were there, some of you.
It was not only better, it was like a hundred percent better. You know what they did.”
Was it better? Facts don’t matter to this president. The crowd – the cheers of his base – that’s what matters.
P.S. I wasn’t the only one nonplused by Trump’s press conference this morning. I recommend a post by Kevin Drum, who offers, via tweets from journalists and commentators, a string that “captures the spirit of Trump’s remarks better than any normal media story you’ll read.”