Donald Trump’s decision to declare a national emergency at the southern border has incensed Democrats, divided Republicans, and spurred immediate—and viable—legal challenges. With the president under fire for the controversial nuclear option, his henchmen dutifully took to the Sunday shows to defend him. But even they struggled to justify Trump’s choice to circumvent Congress, and in some cases did more harm than good.

On ABC News’s This Week, Representative Jim Jordan insisted that Trump’s declaration was, in fact, precipitated by an “emergency”—even as host Martha Raddatz pointed out that illegal border crossings have been on the decline and that, if this were a real emergency, a wall would be a pretty slow way to address it. On CBS News’s Face the Nation, Senator Lindsey Graham went to even more absurd lengths to defend Trump’s move, going so far as to brush aside concerns about programs the wall funds would pull from—including a plan to construct a middle school in Kentucky. “I would say it’s better for the middle-school kids in Kentucky to have a secure border,” Graham said. “We’ll get them the school they need. But right now we’ve got a national emergency on our hands.”

The president’s supporters even struggled to make the case for a “national emergency” on Fox News Sunday, where dead-eyed anti-immigration zealot Stephen Miller got into a heated tiff with Chris Wallace as the anchor pressed him to “name one case where a president has asked Congress for money, Congress has refused, and the president has then invoked national powers to get the money anyway.”

“So the answer is no, there hasn’t been a single case like this,” Wallace concluded after repeated attempts by Miller to duck the question.

The fumbling Sunday was, it seemed, a reflection of the challenges Trump and his allies will face as they defend the nuclear option to the public and in court. If the move was constitutionality questionable to begin with, it was thrown even further into doubt by the president’s rambling Rose Garden speech Friday. “I didn’t need to do this,” Trump said. “But I’d rather do it much faster.” That could very well torpedo any legal justification for the declaration, and will almost certainly be part of California’s lawsuit against the administration—a suit joined by a growing number of states. That lawsuit could be the only chance to stop the maneuver, as it’s not clear those seeking to rein in Trump have enough votes in Congress to override his veto, despite a number of Republicans openly opposing the measure.

Still, based on Team Trump’s lackluster efforts to sell the move, those against the emergency declaration have to feel cautiously optimistic about their chances in court. “We’re confident there are at least eight billion ways that we can prove harm,” Xavier Becerra, the California attorney general leading the lawsuit, told Raddatz on Sunday. “It’s clear that this is not a national emergency.”

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