Trump's Greatest Blunder

Outwardly Donald Trump has made one blunder after another since January, 2017, but most were not blunders if he is indeed a Russian asset.  Rather, they have all been pieces in the agenda of weakening the USA and the West - e.g., disrupting NATO, trade wars that harm the US economy, and pushing Russian talking points - much to Vladimir Putin's delight.  Some have had the added benefit of thrilling the white supremacists and Christian extremists who now comprise the shrunken base of the  Republican Party.  His game of chicken over his border wall - perhaps he saw it as a monument to himself - and the government shutdown, however, was just plain stupid given the opposition it faced from a strong majority of Americans, 71% of whom viewed the wall as not worth the economic havoc of the shutdown. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Trump's caving happened the same day that air traffic controllers began to cancel flights on the East coast.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the stupidity of Trump's blunder and self-inflicted harm - harm that also extends to the worthless GOP.  Here are excerpts:

There is no way around it: President Trump lost.  He lost his gamble on shutting down the government. And though he will pretend otherwise, he has also lost his grandiose plan to build a border wall that most of the country does not want.

Trump walked away with nothing more than an assurance from congressional Democrats that they will sit down with Republicans for three weeks and try to come up with a border security plan that both parties can agree upon. There’s a reasonable chance they will come up with a solid proposal. But there’s just as much likelihood that Trump’s dream for a wall will die a quiet death there.

Nonetheless, this is the consequence of Trump’s obsession with satisfying the red-hatted, nativist throngs who chanted “build the wall” at so many of his rallies.

Not only do 6 in 10 Americans now disapprove of the job that [Trump] the president is doing, but his party has also lost the 10-point edge it once held over the Democrats on the question of which party to trust on border security, according to a fresh Post-ABC News poll.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has shown that she better than Trump understands the art of the deal in Washington. She is the one who succeeded in building a wall — and Trump ran right into it.

Now, as Trump surveys the shambles that his greatest blunder has made of his presidency, the question is whether he and the Republicans learned anything from the five-week calamity that they caused. Will his party be as willing to follow him the next time he leads them toward the edge of a cliff?

If there is even a thin silver lining to the travesty of the longest-ever government shutdown, it is this: The Republicans’ slander of public servants has been exposed for what it is. . . . By its final day, there was turmoil at airports, slowdowns at the Internal Revenue Service and countless individual stories of federal workers who were forced to find sustenance at food pantries and face agonizing choices between whether to pay for heat or medicine this month.

Republicans have long portrayed them [government employees] as the enemies of reform and efficiency. But Trump targeted them as no one did before. From his earliest months in office, he and his allies have portrayed those who dedicate their lives to serving their country as the corrupt, subversive “deep state” — the bottom-feeders of a swamp in need of draining.

Where a little empathy might have been in order as the shutdown continued, Trump’s team revealed a callousness that would have made Marie Antoinette blush.

So it was noticeable that when Trump made his Rose Garden announcement Friday that the government was opening again, he began it by thanking federal workers who had displayed “extraordinary devotion in the face of this recent hardship. You are fantastic people. You are incredible patriots.” . . . . Which is why they deserve much better than a chief executive who would wager so recklessly with their lives and their livelihoods.

The Cascade of False Claims by Trump/Pence to Support Trump's Wall

There's still 20 minutes before Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, a/k/a the liar-in-chief, commences his Oval Office address to the nation stunt, and a piece in CNN looks at the lies and falsehoods floated to date to support Trump's wall which is only wanted by Trump's racist, ignorant, white supremacist base.  It's worth a read so that you will be prepared for the lies that Trump may likely repeat (assuming you watch it and don't simply wait for the Democrat response before tuning in). Here are article excerpts:

Donald Trump and his allies have launched a full-court press to convince Americans, and skeptical lawmakers, that there is a crisis on the Southern border, and the only way to fix it is to approve billions of dollars for Trump's signature border wall.

But senior Trump administration officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have relied on misleading statements to make their case. Trump, who is also prone to repeating debunked talking points about immigration, is set to deliver his Oval Office address about the topic on Tuesday night. Here's a breakdown of the most recent misleading claims, the half-truths and everything in between, along with the fuller picture, based on official statistics and reporting from CNN.

Illegal border-crossings. In each of his three television interviews Tuesday morning, Pence led his argument that there is a crisis on the southern border with one figure: 60,000. . . . Pence's use of that statistic is misleading at best because it gives the impression that 60,000 people are caught trying to sneak in every month. He is lumping in people who presented themselves at ports of entry in addition to those who were apprehended illegally crossing the border.

Official statistics from Customs and Border Protection (CBP) tell the fuller story.

Of the 62,456 individuals who were apprehended or deemed inadmissible at the southern border in November, 10,600 presented themselves at legal US ports of entry and were ultimately deemed inadmissible. [W]hile border apprehensions increased in those months, they didn't surge in an unprecedented fashion as the administration is claiming.  Even including the number of individuals denied admission at designated ports of entry, there were comparable increases and decreases in previous years. The numbers surged to similar levels in late 2016 only to drop again in early 2017, according to CBP numbers.

Terrorists entering the US from Mexico.For months, Trump has raised the specter of "terrorists" crossing the US-Mexico border. He brought this up repeatedly before the 2018 midterms when a caravan of migrants, primarily from impoverished Central American countries, marched through Mexico toward the US border. These claims were debunked at the time as exaggerations and speculation. Though they've made a comeback this year. White House press secretary Sarah Sanders was fact-checked live on Fox News when she said Sunday "nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border." Recent reporting revealed that the actual number encountered on the southern border is nowhere near the staggering 4,000 figure. An administration official told CNN that only about a dozen non-citizens on the terrorism watch list who were stopped at the US-Mexico border in fiscal year 2018. That is a tiny fraction of all known or suspected terrorists who tried to enter or travel to the US in that timeframe. Additionally, a State Department report from 2016 said there was "no credible information that any member of a terrorist group has traveled through Mexico" to sneak into the United States. 'Special interest alien' semantics.
In a fact sheet released Monday, DHS reiterated claims that last year, the agency "encountered more than 3,000 'special interest aliens'" at the southern border. Nielsen touted this number last week from the Rose Garden after Trump publicly pressed lawmakers to fund his wall proposal. There's no uniform definition of the term "special interest alien," but DHS defines a "special interest alien" as a non-US person "who, based on an analysis of travel patterns, potentially pose a national security risk to the United States or its interests."  Someone might be flagged for additional vetting because of where they're traveling from or how they arrived in the US.  That doesn't mean, however, that all "special interest aliens" are terrorists, according to DHS. . . . a Syrian Christian who asks for asylum, for example, would be classified as a "special interest alien" simply because he/she is from Syria. According to a report from the libertarian think tank, no "special interest alien" has produced a terrorist attack on US soil.

Drugs coming across the border.The influx of illegal drugs is another key element of the Trump administration's case for building a wall to address what they describe as a crisis at the border. Pence said Tuesday that "90% of all the heroin that comes into this country, that claims the lives of 300 Americans every week, comes through our southern border."

The majority of hard narcotics seized by Customs and Border Protection come through ports of entry either in packages, cargo or with people who attempt to enter the US legally. . . . the majority of the heroin flow on the southern border into the US is through privately owned vehicles at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods, according to the DEA's 2018 annual drug threat assessment.

A closer look at the numbers shows that in fiscal year 2018, Customs and Border Protection seized 67,292 pounds of methamphetamine at legal ports of entry, compared with 10,382 pounds by Border Patrol agents in between ports, based on available data.