Donald Trump announced his declaration of a national emergency on Friday in a rambling, incoherent press conference that was, according to the Washington Post, “chock-full of false and misleading claims.” Uh, WaPo, you misspelled “lies.” Stop using euphemisms. The man is lying, period. And many of them were lies he’s told before and had shown to be lies.





“And a big majority of the big drugs — the big drug loads don’t go through ports of entry. They can’t go through ports of entry. You can’t take big loads because you have people — we have some very capable people, the Border Patrol, law enforcement — looking.” In demanding a wall on the southern border, Trump has asserted that it would stop the flow of drugs. But the Drug Enforcement Administration says that most illicit drugs enter the United States through legal ports of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside legal cargo in tractor-trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States. Mexican criminal groups control the flow of heroin across the border, the majority of which “is through [privately owned vehicles] entering the United States at legal ports of entry, followed by tractor-trailers, where the heroin is co-mingled with legal goods,” the DEA said in its 2018 National Drug Threat Assessment. (Later in the news conference, Trump dismissed this as “a lie.”) But the numbers don’t lie: The arm of the DHS that works at ports of entry seized 4,813 pounds of heroin in the first 11 months of fiscal 2018, compared with the 532 pounds seized by Border Patrol. Seven times as much cocaine was seized at ports of entry then between them, as well. Marijuana is the only drug that is seized more often between ports of entry. Meanwhile, fentanyl, a deadly synthetic opioid, can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.

He claims his own DEA is lying when he’s the one lying. Absolutely shameless.

“In El Paso, they have close to 2,000 murders right on the other side of the wall. And they had 23 murders. It’s a lot of murders. But it’s not close to 2,000 murders, right on the other side of the wall, in Mexico.” Even though Juarez and El Paso sit roughly a 20-minute drive from each other across the U.S.-Mexico border in Texas, the two cities have vastly different homicide rates. El Paso had 23 slayings in 2018, according to the El Paso Police Department. Juarez did not have “nearly 2,000” slayings in 2018 but 1,032, according to the Mexican government. The president regularly claims this difference can be attributed to the physical barrier between the cities. But El Paso had the third-lowest violent-crime rate among 35 U.S. cities with a population over 500,000 in 2005, 2006 and 2007 — before construction of a 57-mile-long fence started in mid-2008.

He told that lie before and it was shown to be a lie. But he doesn’t care. He will say anything, absolutely anything, to sell what he wants to sell. Whether it’s true or not is utterly irrelevant to him, it never even crosses his mind to wonder if it’s true or not. If he wants it to be true, it’s true. If he needs it to be true, it’s true. Magic!