You can't tell the story of Trump's irrational border wall obsession without including the central, humiliating fact that he regularly promised that Mexico would pay for the 2,000-mile barrier. Yet that's exactly what the press is doing today: omitting that defining lie about the border wall.
I know this because I recently examined 16 articles that were published by the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN in the immediate wake of Trump's border “emergency” announcement. Combined, the pieces totaled nearly 20,000 words.
How many of those 16 news articles mentioned that Mexico was supposed to pay for the wall? Only two, and those references totaled just 60 words. That's astonishing. The entire reason for the unfolding constitutional showdown is that Trump couldn't get Mexico to pay for the border wall, and then couldn't get Congress to pay for it, either. Yet in the news coverage today, there's often no mention of the origins of the controversy. Many in the press are turning a collective blind eye to the absurd genesis of the border wall story, and that helps Trump.
The breakdown: I cast a wide net and collected 16 articles that were all published either Feb. 15 or Feb. 16, immediately following Trump's announcement, as news organizations flooded the zone for the big news. I looked at six dispatches from the Times, six from the Post, and four from CNN. A total of 34 reporter bylines were part of the “national emergency” reports, which included straight-up news pieces, news analysis stories, and fact-checking posts.
When I first collected the stories, I had no idea how many did or did not mention Mexico paying for the wall. My hunch was the number would be low, but I was shocked when the number turned out to be two—and the two references were fleeting at best.
This was a typical passage, via a Post dispatch, regarding Trump's national emergency announcement: "His decision to do so, after not getting the money he wanted from Congress to put toward construction of his wall, has drawn immense criticism as an overreach of executive power."
And there was this lede from CNN:
President Donald Trump on Friday declared a national emergency to unlock billions of dollars in federal funds to build a wall on the southern border, bypassing Congress after lawmakers refused to meet his multi-billion dollar request for border wall funds.
See how Mexico has been completely eliminated from the story? As the Washington press prefers to tell it today, Trump wants money for a wall, and Democrats in Congress won't agree to it. Surgically removed from the narrative is the fact that Trump spent more than a year emphatically promising to get Mexico to pay for the wall.
This is Olympic-level gaslighting.
The Washington Post even published a tick-tock piece headlined, "How President Trump came to declare a national emergency to fund his border wall." The article stressed that "Building a wall on the southern border was a cornerstone of Trump’s presidential campaign." Incredibly, the piece made no mention that Trump came to declare a national emergency to fund his border wall because he had lied for years about Mexico paying for it. Elephants in the room don't get much bigger than that—yet here we are. (Note that at the Rose Garden event on Feb. 15, no reporters asked Trump why Mexico wasn't paying for the wall.)
I'm not suggesting all mentions of Trump's hollow Mexico boast have disappeared in the press, because that's obviously not the case. (Here's an example where it was stressed.) But to look at much of the news coverage following Trump's “national emergency” announcement, it's clear Mexico was mostly eliminated from the story. That's the press sending a clear message that Trump's signature, irrational Mexico lie no longer really matters.
Yes, we know Mexico isn't going to build the wall. And yes, Trump lies about everything. But in this instance, where the news cycle is so clearly being driven by funding of the wall, it's journalistic malpractice not to mention, early and often, in as many reports as possible, that Trump is unleashing a constitutional showdown with Congress because as a candidate, he lied relentlessly about who would pay for the wall.
And the truth is that even for someone like myself who follows the news for a living, it's very easy to lose sight of the big picture and what a colossal charade Trump's wall has become. For instance, last week, as the Beltway plunged further into chaos over wall funding, it wasn't until I saw this tweet that I was startled back to reality with an “oh shit” moment:
That's not to say there hasn't been some good, skeptical coverage of the wall issue in recent days. There has been, with journalists pointing out Trump has no basis to declare an "emergency" at the border. Trump's entire national emergency proclamation is built around another huge lie. “It’s an invasion,” Trump insisted last week. “We have an invasion of drugs and criminals coming into our country.” That’s false, obviously. The number of undocumented immigrants crossing the southern border into the United States has been declining for decades.
Still, the avoidance of the Mexico-will-pay-for-it lie stands out as a colossal miscue. More importantly, it signals once again how Trump gets away with lying simply by lying nonstop. You get the sense that journalists become exhausted by the daily and hourly prevarications and just throw up their hands. Like with the wall.
The whole issue of the wall is built around a torrent of Trump lies regarding border crossings, drug flow, human trafficking, and funding. Collectively, it represents a case study in how the D.C. press seems either unprepared or unwilling to effectively deal with an unapologetic liar in the Oval Office.
Flushing Trump's signature fabrication about Mexico paying for the wall down the memory hole highlights a stunning newsroom failure.
Eric Boehlert is a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon. He is the author of Lapdogs: How the Press Rolled Over for Bush and Bloggers on the Bus. You can follow him on Twitter @EricBoehlert.
This post was written and reported through our Daily Kos freelance program.