By and large, Fox News is the White House's most reliable aide for laundering Donald Trump's worst ideas. Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and the interchangeable couch-warmers on Fox & Friends all participate in a Human Centipede-esque feedback loop with the president, validating his anti-immigrant hysteria and providing him with new ideas and talking points.

When Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, it's likely she was expecting more of the encouraging fawning that pervades the network so much of the time. What she got instead was fact-checking and push back. Wallace initially takes issue with Homeland Security secretary Kristjen Nielsen saying that DHS had stopped 3000 "special interest aliens" from entering the U.S.—Wallace points out that this designation only means that these are people who are from the same countries as other terrorists, not people who are suspected terrorists themselves.

Rather than address that point specifically, or at all, Sanders responds by claiming that 4000 "known or suspected terrorists" come into the U.S. illegally, and since the weakest point of entry is the southern border, we need a border wall. Wallace actually interrupts her here:

"Wait, wait, wait, because I know the statistic, I didn't know if you were gonna use it but I studied up on this. Do you know where those 4000 people come from, where they're captured? Airports. The State Department says there hasn't been any terrorist that they've found coming across the southern border."

It's not quite the fury and emotion of Geraldo Rivera's on-air rant about the demonization of immigrants, and it certainly didn't stop Sanders from repeating herself as though she were saying something new. But when faced with a journalist who's supposed to carry water for her and the president, someone she can't attack as a liberally biased "enemy of the people," Sanders suddenly can't come up with anything off script.