Donald Trump is a master at manufacturing faux crises. He is not a master at faking humanitarian concern.

He thought that speaking from the Oval Office and sitting behind the Resolute desk would help him invoke a grave national crisis. It’s the setting that JFK used to tell the country about life-threatening Cuban missiles. It’s where George W Bush tried to calm the country after 9/11.

Speaking robotically and looking isolated and lonely, the president tried to sell his unnecessary and inhumane $5bn border wall using stale arguments we have heard many times before. The speech sounded like campaign rhetoric and contained nothing new. In a fundraising letter I received by email in the afternoon, the president’s naked political aims were obvious.

“I want to know who stood with me when it mattered most so I’ve asked my team to send me a list of EVERY AMERICAN PATRIOT who donates to the Official Secure the Border Fund.” Then came the tin cup.

Mainly the speech was the same litany of lies Trump has told to try to strong-arm Congress into paying for his wall

“Please make a special contribution of $5 by 9PM EST to our Official Secure the Border Fund to have your name sent to me after my speech.” After the short speech, another fundraising plea arrived, extending the deadline.

In the speech, he unsuccessfully argued (as he has all along) that the Democrats are to blame for the government shutdown that has already lasted 19 days, the second longest ever. The only reason the government is shut down is because of Trump’s stubborn demand that his wall be funded.

There was some criticism of the television networks for agreeing to forgo regular programming to carry the president’s first Oval Office address live. While it’s normal to grant such presidential requests, this is not a normal presidency and the musty, blatantly partisan speech the president gave creates a strong case for turning him down next time.

Mainly the speech was the same litany of lies the president has told to try to strong-arm Congress into paying for his wall. He actually dropped one of his administration’s lies – that 4,000 terrorists have crossed into the country from the porous southern border. His press secretary, Sarah Sanders, got demolished on Fox News over the weekend when anchor Chris Wallace revealed the claim to be nonsense. The State Department has said that no terrorists have been found crossing the southern border from Mexico into the US, and said in a 2017 report that there was “no credible evidence” indicating that international terrorist groups have established bases in Mexico or sent operatives into the US.

He also added a couple of new whoppers. The first was that Democrats want the wall to be steel, not concrete. The second was a pathetic attempt to fulfil his promise that Mexico would pay for his wall by claiming that a new trade deal with Mexico will generate the equivalent of the cost of the wall.

Play Video 2:55 Trump v Democrats: two contrasting views on US border wall proposal – video

He did a little shape-shifting. Instead of framing his faux crisis mainly as a national security crisis that requires the involvement of American troops, he called it a humanitarian crisis. He invoked a “crisis of the soul”, and the suffering of children in detention, but he looked uncomfortable even saying the word soul. He spoke of a “cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end”.

The only time the president seemed revved-up was during the gory part of his script, when he recited a litany of brutal murders of Americans by “illegal aliens”. The cheapest line in the speech was asking, “How much more American blood must be shed for Congress to do its job?”.

Even the lies were stale. There is no flood of illegal immigrants coming across the 1,900-mile border with Mexico. Numbers are down from a peak in 2000. What’s different and more tragic now is the number of migrants traveling with children. In November, the number of migrant families with children exceeded 25,000 – the highest number ever recorded.

The heroin and fentanyl that the president used as an ingredient of his crisis do not come across the southern border. According to drug threat assessments from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the majority of the drugs that cross the border are brought in through official ports of entry. This has been the case for years. There are certainly grave humanitarian problems at the border, but they are almost all caused by the Trump administration’s cruel arrest, detention and asylum policies. Many of the new Trump immigration edicts, unsurprisingly, have been struck down by federal courts.

Two children have already died. Children are being housed in detention centers built for single male adults that were never intended for children. Then there are the hundreds of migrants for whom there is no adequate shelter who are being literally dumped by Trump administration officials on to the streets of cities like El Paso. “We’re dealing with the symptoms of the root cause, which is the lack of a rational immigration policy from Washington, and both sides are culpable,” Dee Margo, the mayor of El Paso, told the New York Times.

Border wall speech: Trump is losing the macho game of staring himself down in the mirror | Richard Wolffe Read more

By making asylum requests nearly impossible to process, the people waiting to file are being detained for much lengthier periods. They are arriving sicker. The number of detainees at Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities has reached its highest point ever, with an average daily population of 45,200 single adults and family units.

The presidential address was so lame that it seemed to have taken the steam out of the rebuttal delivered by the Democratic leaders, too. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who spoke first, said the government could easily re-open if the shutdown and border security were decoupled. That’s common sense, and even Republicans are growing impatient with the shutdown. Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of appealing “to fear not facts” and governing by “temper tantrum”.

The politically inspired crisis is a familiar Trump ploy. In the weeks leading up to the November election, Trump used the “caravan invasion” to declare a grave national security threat. Then he lost the House to the Democrats and suddenly there were no more presidential tweets about the so-called invasion.

This speech was such a nothing that it left some in the audience wondering whether the urgency the White House claimed was intended to distract from the raft of new revelations from Mueller’s Russia investigation. For Donald Trump, that’s a real crisis.

• Jill Abramson is a Guardian columnist