Tag: #TrumpShutDown

Trump’s frustrated sales pitch on the border wall reverts to his oldest political tactic: Fear

President Trump delivers a televised address on Tuesday. Credit: Joshua Roberts, Reuters

President Trump, as he himself will tell you in a heartbeat, wasn’t supposed to win. Pundit after pundit predicted time and again that his comments would doom him, that his rhetoric was too virulent, that his tone was too aggressive. But he built a following among Republican primary voters that carried him (however bumpily) to the nomination and then, using the same rhetoric of danger and fear, leveraged partisan loyalty to squeak past Hillary Clinton by enough votes in enough places and prove everyone wrong. Trump can’t win the presidency? He just did, running the same race at the end as he had at the beginning.

There was a lesson Trump took from that, clearly: The pundits are wrong, and villainizing immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East works. He internalized the importance of holding the same core base of support that was with him early on and, however overtly, has maintained a focus on offering the same rhetoric that earned their love in the first place.

From that perspective, it’s not a surprise that Trump’s first Oval Office address to the country focused on stoking visceral fear of people crossing America’s southern border. Sure, there was, as expected, the sort of misleading data on the flow of drugs from Mexico, failing to note that (as his administration admits) the majority of those drugs and that heroin comes through existing checkpoints. Sure, he argued that the revised NAFTA agreement that hasn’t yet been ratified would somehow mean Mexico will pay for the wall, which it doesn’t. But that’s not really what he wanted Americans to focus on.

View the complete January 8 article by Philip Bump on The Washington Post website here.

Fact-checking President Trump’s Oval Office address on immigration

The president’s address to the nation on immigration was littered with falsehoods he’s said before. (Meg Kelly/The Washington Post)

The first misleading statement in President Trump’s Oval Office address Tuesday night came in the first sentence.

Trump, addressing a national television audience from behind his desk, warned of a “security crisis at the southern border” — even though the number of people caught trying to cross illegally is near 20-year lows.

Another false claim came moments later, when Trump said border agents “encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country” every day, though his administration puts the daily average for 2018 in the hundreds. A few sentences later, he said 90 percent of the heroin in the United States comes across the border with Mexico, ignoring the fact that most of the drugs come through legal entry points and wouldn’t be stopped by the border wall that he is demanding as the centerpiece of his showdown with Democrats.

View the complete January 9 by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.

On the Border, Little Enthusiasm for a Wall: ‘We Have Other Problems That Need Fixing’ The Borderland Cafe in Columbus, N.M., on Tuesday. Credit Caitlin O’Hara for The New York Times Image

The Borderland Cafe in Columbus, N.M., on Tuesday. Credit: Caitlin O’Hara, The New York Times

COLUMBUS, N.M. — Just minutes from the border in rural New Mexico, the Borderland Cafe in the village of Columbus serves burritos and pizza to local residents, Border Patrol agents and visitors from other parts of the country seeking a glimpse of life on the frontier. The motto painted on the wall proclaims “Life is good in the Borderland.”

“This is the sleepiest little town you could think of,” said Adriana Zizumbo, 31, who was raised in Columbus and owns the cafe with her husband. “The only crisis we’re facing here is a shortage of labor. Fewer people cross the border to work than before, and Americans don’t want to get their hands dirty doing hard work.”

President Trump has shut down part of the government over border security and his plan to build a wall along the border with Mexico, and in a prime-time speech on Tuesday night he painted a bleak picture of life in towns like Columbus.

View the complete January 8 article by Simon Romero, Manny Fernandez, Jose A. Del Real and Azam Ahmed on The New York Times website here.

This is how Trump’s border wall shutdown threatens U.S. security

Pres. Trump Hosted Both Democratic and Republican Lawmakers at the White House for a Meeting as the Government Shutdown Heads Into Its Third Week, Credit: Alex Wong, Getty Images

This has nothing to do with immigrants or the border.

With President Trump holding the federal government ransom to pay for a wall he promised Mexico would fund, and considering the declaration of a “national emergency” to force the military to construct it, he has resorted to several different arguments. Beyond the desire to keep a campaign promise, or allegedly save money, Trump’s main argument has been that building a wall will keep Americans safe.

The cruel irony is that the government shutdown, caused by Trump’s insistence on wall funding, is actually making Americans less secure in a variety of ways.

On Monday, Trump sent out a campaign email asking supporters to sign a petition to “tell Democrats to build the wall” because, “They don’t care about your safety, they only care about Presidential Harassment!” The hosts of Fox News’ Fox & Friends agree with Trump’s security argument, saying last week that while the shutdown might be “an inconvenience” to some, “you deserve to be able to go to sleep at night and not have to worry about being killed by an illegal immigrant.”

View the complete January 8 article by Ryan Koronowski on the ThinkProgress.org website here.

OUT OF TOUCH: White House Says Workers ‘Better Off’ From Trump Shutdown

Trump and his White House are extremely out of touch with the workers whose paychecks they are holding hostage.

Trump’s top economic advisor said that in some sense workers are “better off” from the Trump Shutdown because they’re basically taking vacation.

HASSETT: “Workers are furloughed, and right now, it’s about 25 percent of government workers are furloughed, which means that they are not allowed to go to work.  But then, when the shutdown ends, they go back to work and they get their back pay. A huge share of government workers were going to take vacation days, say, between Christmas and New Year’s. And then we have a shutdown, and so they can’t go to work, and so then they have the vacation, but they don’t have to use their vacation days.  And then they come back, and then they get their back pay. Then they’re — in some sense, they’re better off.”

Trump previously wrote off the workers hurt by his shutdown, suggesting that they weren’t really in pain.

VICE: “President Donald Trump has a message for federal workers who once again won’t receive their paychecks Friday: Some people have more pain than you.’” Continue reading “OUT OF TOUCH: White House Says Workers ‘Better Off’ From Trump Shutdown”

DAY 21: Workers Miss Their First Paycheck From The Trump Shutdown

The Trump Shutdown enters its 21st day and hundreds of thousands of workers across the country will now officially miss their paychecks. The Trump Shutdown has also forced thousands of workers to file for unemployment, hurt low-income senior citizens, and made our airlines less safe. Here’s the latest:

Workers will miss their first paycheck today because of the Trump Shutdown.

USA Today: “It was supposed to be payday. But paychecks are on hold for some 800,000 federal employees forced to go on unpaid leave or work without pay since Dec. 22 because of the government shutdown.”

The Trump Shutdown has already forced thousands of workers to file for unemployment.

CNBC: “Amid shutdown, thousands of federal workers file for unemployment”

CNBC: “More than 4,700 federal employees filed for unemployment in the last week of December, compared with 929 the week prior, according to the Department of Labor.” Continue reading “DAY 21: Workers Miss Their First Paycheck From The Trump Shutdown”

Former Trump aide: The wall was never supposed to be a literal thing

Credit: Evan Vuccil, AP Photo

Trump took a symbol of racism and made it the center of his presidency — because he liked the attention it got him at rallies.

Trump’s obsession with the border wall has now caused a government shutdown, but it was originally introduced to him by aides as a way to keep his campaign speeches under control.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump’s advisors struggled to figure out how to get Trump, who hates to prepare for things, to focus on the issue of immigration during campaign speeches.

“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled asking Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser, according to the New York Times. “We’re going to get him to talk about how he’s going to build a wall.”

View the complete January 7 article by Dan Desai Martin on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Pelosi cranks up shutdown pressure on Trump, GOP

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Democrats are ramping up pressure on President Trump and Republicans to open the government amid a prolonged impasse over border wall funding that shows no signs of abating.

Sensing a winning hand, Democrats this week will repackage a handful of uncontroversial bills funding a number of shuttered agencies — excluding Homeland Security, which covers the proposed wall — and send them off to the Senate one by one, forcing GOP leaders to explain their promised inaction on measures they supported just weeks ago.

“I have said over and over again, we need to reopen the government and then have a serious discussion about border security,” Rep. Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Appropriations Committee, said Monday in an interview with New York Public Radio.

View the complete January 8 article by Mike Lillis and Scott Wong on The Hill website here.

President Trump threatened to declare a national emergency to get his wall. Can he do that?

President Trump at the White House on Thursday. Credit: Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post

This time, President Trump is right about the law.

As the partial government shutdown entered its third week, Trump announced Friday he is flirting with the idea of declaring a national emergency and circumventing Congress to begin construction of the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

“I can do it if I want,” Trump said. And legally speaking, he can.

View the complete January 7 article by Deanna Paul on The Washington Post website here.

Newest shutdown casualty: Trump’s own policies

Among other administration priorities, the government shutdown is hampering efforts by agencies such as EPA and the Interior department to unwind Obama-era energy regulations. Credit: Brennan Linsley, File, AP Photo

From energy to opioids to trade, proposals championed by the president and his supporters are snarled in the D.C. impasse.

The government shutdown is threatening important pieces of President Donald Trump’s agenda, escalating the political stakes as he and Congress vie to see who blinks first.

At EPA and the Interior Department, furloughs have frozen efforts to roll back Obama-era regulations and open new water to oil and gas drilling. The White House has sent home key staff coordinating its response to the opioid crisis. And if the partial shutdown drags on long enough, it could force Trump to cancel a late-January trip to Davos, Switzerland, and delay congressional action on the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal.

Trump shows no signs of backing off, telling reporters that the shutdown — triggered by his demands that Congress fund a border wall — has “a higher purpose than next week’s pay.” But the potential blowback to his own policy priorities shows that the closure is likely to inflict cascading harm as it continues, beyond its initial impact on parks, museums and federal workers’ paychecks.

View the complete January 8 article by Eric Wolff and Brianna Ehley on the Politico website here.