There’s no better way to be welcomed into the new year than by an all-caps rant. Still huddling in the White House in his unbroken stint of Executive Time, Trump turned to Twitter an astounding 16 times on the first day of the year, but really you didn’t have to read past “THE HATERS AND THE FAKE NEWS MEDIA” to know that Trump remained unvisited by any life-reforming spirits over the holiday season. Oh, and Trump padded out his quote with advice that Americans “JUST CALM DOWN AND ENJOY THE RIDE,” a quote he seems to have lifted from Bill Cosby. Or possibly Ted Bundy.
In the first day of 2019, Trump also renewed his fresh war on everyone who ever worked his or her way to the top of the military ranks, this time going after a retired four-star general Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of US forces in Afghanistan. Trump said McChrystal had a “big dumb mouth” put McChrystal’s title in quotes, implying that he wasn’t a real general, and again employed the term “fired like a dog,” which … why does Donald Trump have such a thing against dogs? McChrystal’s crime was appearing in an interview over the weekend, where he was expressed his belief that serial philanderer, convicted money-launderer, and constant liar Trump was “immoral.”
But Trump reserved most of his holiday twit-a-thon for making wall-related tweets. Since determining that the approval of Ann Coulter is more important than the operation of the government, Trump has raised the bar on lowering his IQ, offering a stream of wildly-inaccurate, or simply incomprehensible, posts about the wall, wall, wall. As the Washington Post reports, Trump said that “every single Democrat” had supported a wall before he wanted it. But not only did previous legislation call for much less substantial barriers along much more restricted sections of the border, many Democrats voted against funding even those fences—including Nancy Pelosi. And Trump claimed that President Obama had built a “ten foot wall” around his new home in Washington, D.C. a statement that could be tested by just pointing cameras in that direction and … yep, another lie.
Trump also continued to insist, against all evidence, that terrorists were pouring into the United States across the southern border. He made multiple claims about the barrier between Israel and Palestinian territories—nine tenths of which does not have a wall. Trump continued his pretense that a wall would halt drugs, most of which are smuggled in by vehicles that pass through legal entry points. If Trump were to get his complete barrier, whether concrete as he previously claimed or made from “shiny steel slats,” the Post reports that it would have “a minimal effect” on drugs coming into the United States.
And Trump found a way to blame the government shutdown on not just Democrats, but Dreamers.
Trump’s DACA-is-to-blame tweet came between Christmas and New Years, where he claimed that a judge’s decision to preserve DACA had caused Democrats to pull a deal that would have traded DACA for a wall. Except there never was such a deal.
After a meeting at the White House, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer made a deal with Trump that would preserve DACA without providing a dime for the wall. It was Trump who withdrew from that deal when, just as when he blocked the government funding bill he’d earlier promised to support, right-wing media mouths called him weak. And between the time Trump agreed to the deal and he dropped the deal, exactly no judge made any ruling on DACA. The entire “Democrats dropped the deal because of a judge’s ruling” story line is a complete creation, with zero resemblance to reality—but it’s a fiction being frequently repeated by the same media sources that talked Trump in dropping a deal on a program that American’s support.
Trump rounded out his wall fantasies with a series of tweets that had him declaring that he would violate the NAFTA 1.1 agreement that he just finished negotiating to mess with the struggling auto industry, continuing to misrepresent the entire idea of international trade. Mangling the idea of trade has become the limp answer to Trump’s claims that Mexico would pay for the wall.
Trump also took time to blame parents seeking a better life for the death of their children.
“The two children in question were very sick before they were given over to Border Patrol. The father of the young girl said it was not their fault, he hadn’t given her water in days. Border Patrol needs the Wall and it will all end. They are working so hard & getting so little credit!”
Except that neither child appears to have been sick prior to be taken into custody, and the father of the young girl says exactly the opposite of what Trump claims. So does the Border Patrol, which did not note any health problems when taking in either child.
Trump’s wall lies are so transparent … isn’t it time for him to just claim he has built a big, beautiful, completely transparent wall and be done with it?