Mod: The certifiable madman in the White House took his race war border fantasies to new depths yesterday. Just one more in a seemingly endless series of fake Trump events that are both dangerously detached from reality and an embarrassment to our country.
Trump’s Bizarre, Rambling Announcement of a National Emergency (
The Atlantic link): After failing for two years to persuade
Congress to fund a wall on the southern border,
President Donald Trump on Friday said he will declare a national emergency and reallocate some $8 billion to build the wall through executive fiat.
Trump announced the move in a rambling, free-associative appearance in the
White House Rose Garden that was more
MAGA rally than presidential announcement.
Even by the standards of this president, his remarks were confusing, untruthful, and often off topic, with strange ad-hominem attacks on other politicians and sharp exchanges with reporters. Despite claiming that the nation faces an acute crisis that requires immediate attention, the president meandered through a long preamble about trade deals and
North Korea. When he finally got to the point, he struggled to stay focused.
“We’re going to be signing today and registering national emergency,” he said. “And it’s a great thing to do, because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people, and it’s unacceptable. And by signing the national emergency, something signed many times by other presidents, many, many times,
President Obama, in fact, we may be using one of the national emergencies that he signed having to do with cartels, criminal cartels. It’s a very good emergency that he signed … And what we really want to do is simple. It’s not like it is complicated. It’s very simple. We want to stop drugs from coming into our country. We want to stop criminals and gangs from coming into our country. Nobody has done the job that we have ever done.”
Yet
Trump also undermined his own case for the national emergency, effectively saying the declaration was all about political expediency.
“I can do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. I would rather do it much faster,” the president said, an astonishing acknowledgment that could come back to haunt him in court.
Read: What the president could do if he declares a national emergency
It was one of the least coherent appearances
Trump has made in a presidency noted for its incoherence. Yet the circus in the
Rose Garden threatened to distract from a major policy announcement.
During a briefing Friday morning, acting
White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney said that
Trump would take $600 million from a
Treasury Department forfeiture fund, $2.5 billion from a
Defense Department counter-drug fund, and another $3.6 billion from
Pentagon military-construction money. Only the construction funds require an emergency declaration.
Trump will not take money from disaster-relief funds, an idea that had been discussed.
The move is sure to draw legal challenges, and might not take effect exactly as
Trump described. But the fact remains that the president has declared a national emergency in order to save face with anti-immigration members of the conservative media and his base, having been roundly defeated in a joust with
Congress over funding. In essence, the president has created a new crisis to get himself out of a previous crisis—which he also created. And the timing of
Trump’s announcement, after months of equivocating and congressional debate, hardly supports the idea of an acute crisis.
CBS Goes With 'The Price Is Right' Over Conclusion Of President Trump's Emergency Speech (
Deadline.com link): National emergency on the border? In one network’s news judgment, it was more important to say, “
Come on, down!”
CBS coverage of
President Donald Trump’s televised address on his national emergency declaration ended 21 minutes before its conclusion, as the eye network opted to return viewers to game show
The Price Is Right. All of the other broadcast and cable news networks carried the declaration and press conference on Friday afternoon to its conclusion.
The
Trump announcement from the
Rose Garden of the
White House was delayed from its original 10:30 AM eastern time start.
Trump said he was declaring the emergency “because we have an invasion of drugs, invasion of gangs, invasion of people.”
CBS News reported that the
White House assured the network
Trump’s speech would be no longer than eight minutes. But
Trump started at 1:10 PM and finished at 2 PM.
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