Five thousand judges.

Ever since his administration*’s child-kidnapping ring was exposed, the president* has told this story about how “they” came into his office and “they” said we need 5,000 judges to handle cases on the border. His latest iteration of this saga came on Monday night, during his improv set in front of an audience of eager goobers in South Carolina.

“They came to me three days ago and they said, ‘Sir, we’d like you to sign this order.’ What is the order? ‘We need 5000 judges on the border,’ I said, ‘Judges? What other country has judges?’ I said, ‘How many do we have now?’ They didn’t even know. So we have thousands of judges and now we’re going to have 5000. Now I’ve done a good job with judges – Judge Gorsuch [Goobers scream with delight], Supreme Court justice. And we have many judges, we will set the record I believe, for the most judges appointed, which is a very important thing…But they come up and, ‘Sir, we need 5000 judges.’… So we put a judge like on the bench, federal, it takes us weeks. It takes us a long time to get the judge. We’re talking about one person here.

Here they want 5000. I said, ‘Where are you going to find 5000 people to be judges? How many do we have now?’ ‘I don’t know the number.’ They don’t even know the number even though they’re in charge. Nobody knows the number. We have thousands of judges already…I said, ‘I don’t want judges. I want ICE and Border Patrol agents.”

This is all a lie. There is no “they.” This meeting never happened. Nobody ever told him that we needed 5,000 judges. As it happens, there have not been 5,000 judges in the entire history of the federal court system. There are only a little less than 900 judges working in the federal system now, so we do not have “thousands of judges already.” And the phantom “they” are wrong about how many judges we have handling these cases now. Congress has authorized 484 of these judges, and less than 400 are presently working. This whole passage is one bald-faced non-fact after another.

(I would have added, “…and the president* knows it," but the president* doesn’t know anything about anything.)

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He doesn’t care. The goobers don’t care. And, apparently, the elite political media is so banjaxed on the subject of civility and what they consider to be fairness that the president* could have said we have three million judges and half of them are Martians, and he would be said to be only “obfuscating” or “exaggerating,” especially about the number of Martians.

I mention this because, in an un-bylined piece on Monday, Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the Times, tied himself in a sheepshank trying to explain the rules under which his newspaper would call a lie a lie. (The piece was unbylined because Baquet did away with the job of NYT public editor over a year ago.) From the NYT:

The word “lie” is very powerful. For one thing, it assumes that someone knew the statement was false. Another reason to use the word judiciously is that our readers could end up focusing more on our use of the word than on what was said. And using “lie” repeatedly could feed the mistaken notion that we’re taking political sides. That’s not our role. Of course, even when we don’t say “lie,” we try to make it very clear to readers if a politician says something false, and to present the evidence showing that the statement isn’t true.

Can you figure out what the standard is? I can’t. “We’ll demonstrate that it’s a lie but we won’t call it a lie because our readers might be confused if we call a lie a lie”? The real problem for all the rest of us is that, if you don’t call a lie for what it is, you can’t reasonably evaluate the motive the president* might have for telling it in the first place, and then persisting in it later.

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Take, for example, the 5,000 Judges Lie. There is a distinct purpose behind it, and that is to delegitimize all legal restraints on the president*. The lie is in keeping with his attack on due process a week ago. He wants to gin up weaponized ignorance against the federal courts—possibly because he sees himself facing the business end of one somewhere down the line—and beginning by creating a phantom bureaucracy to rail against while creating a very real problem. This is straight out of the Republican playbook as rewritten in the days of Ronald Reagan: starve an agency until it’s overwhelmed, and then make it (and “government” generally) an object of scorn and ridicule because it can’t do its job.

The president* lies about 5,000 judges to demonstrate that he is the only one standing between the country and elite MS-13-enabling pettifoggers. Meanwhile, the actual courts on the actual border are understaffed and choking on more cases than they are equipped to handle. See, he will say, giving these people due process doesn’t work. And the buses start rolling from dawn to dusk, disappearing children into a dark and forbidding country.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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