The Oval Office is an iconic space in American political life. Televised addresses from the seat of presidential power have marked historic moments of national anxiety: JFK and the Cuban missile crisis, Ronald Reagan and the Challenger disaster, George HW Bush and the start of the Gulf war.

To that august list we can now add Donald Trump and the most pressing crisis facing this commander-in-chief: the disastrous damage already inflicted on his own ego by his dopey idea of a beautiful border wall.

This is a very real crisis inside one man’s cranium and it’s playing out in the living rooms of a weary nation. That crisis is called reality.

Donald Trump's border wall speech – in full Read more

At every campaign stop in 2016, Trump promised to build a wall that Mexico would pay for. Soon it became clear that Mexico was laughing too loud to pay for anything. Somewhere along the way, the wall became a series of steel slats.

At this point, it’s hard to know which one of his many delusions are winning the day. When Trump’s lapdog Republicans controlled all of Washington, he couldn’t get Congress to pay for his wall. Now the Democrats control half of Congress, he thinks he can force Congress to pay for his wall. His forcing mechanism is to shut down his own government, claim credit for the shutdown, and then blame everyone else.

Now he looks like a fool both before and after he loses this macho game of staring himself down in the mirror. A genius move nobody has ever dared consider. Until now.

These desperate times call for desperate measures. If reality won’t bend to Trump, then Trump will have to bend reality.

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

Sitting behind the Resolute desk where he sometimes poses to sign blank pieces of paper, Trump reframed his indiscriminate crackdown on immigrants as “a growing humanitarian and security crisis”. Summoning the shallow reserves of human empathy that lie buried deep within, he lamented how families were suffering at the border.

“The children are used as human pawns,” he declared, noting that “women and children are the biggest victims, by far, of our broken system.”

He gulped at the words on the prompter like he was swallowing horse pills

How true. They have been used as human pawns – by a president with an immoral and illegal policy to separate infants from parents, locking up children in detention camps, and caring so little for their wellbeing that several have died in the custody of the richest country on the planet. Not since Hannibal Lecter tried to charm Clarice have we witnessed such a chilling love of humanity.

To be fair, Trump isn’t concerned with all Americans. He’s especially troubled by the way immigrants are hurting our minorities. “Among those hardest hit are African Americans and Hispanic Americans,” said the man who thought there were some very fine people among the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville.

Far from reassuring a troubled nation, Trump did what he does best: he tried to scare the living daylights out of them. Especially the poor old scared folk who already watch Fox News. He said there are “vast quantities” of drugs coming over the Mexican border that would literally run into a brick wall if there was one. Or possibly a steel slat.

He didn’t mention all the drugs smuggled in containers by land, sea and air, which get waved through customs.

But he did mention the murders and rapes, the hammer beatings and knife stabbings, and of course the beheadings and dismemberments. And no, he wasn’t talking about his Saudi friends. He was talking about undocumented immigrants, who are in fact responsible for a lower crime rate than the general population.

For a reality TV star, Trump is a helplessly untrained beast in his natural environment. This was less of a fireside chat than a trial by fire and brimstone. He gulped at the words on the prompter like he was swallowing horse pills. He sniffed and snorted between sentences like he was midway through the punishing workout of an elite 239-pound athlete. He squinted at the camera as if it was hiding between steel slats, made in American steel mills.

Of course, this is no ordinary stage. Reagan was a camera-ready star but he never lived down his B-movie career in gems like Bedtime for Bonzo. Trump, on the other hand, will never live up to his primetime career as a businessman in The Apprentice.

According to our entrepreneur-in-chief, his beloved border wall will pay for itself many times over by stopping all those drugs. It will also be paid for many times over by tariffs on Mexican goods. In that case, we have a self-financing bridge in Brooklyn that the Trump Organization might be interested in purchasing.

In one way, Trump is right. There is a national emergency threatening the peace and prosperity of its citizens. Americans desperately need a drastic intervention to wall off unprecedented and unwanted dangers to our law and order. But the solution is less of a construction than a prosecution.

There are concrete and steel-slatted structures that can deal with the nefarious actors who are undermining America’s national identity in such profound ways. They may be a fifth-century solution to containing threats to the public order, but they do succeed, no matter what the Democrats say. They’re called prison cells and you can find several of Trump’s one-time closest aides inside them now or soon.

Trump fuels immigration fears in TV address on 'border crisis' Read more

It is beyond time to recognize that foreigners have infiltrated this country’s borders, as malicious governments send us their very worst people. Unfortunately they are not crossing the southern border but rather taking flying caravans as they travel from Russia to meet with Trump’s aides in various foreign capitals. Some have even tried to melt into the heartland as card-carrying members of the National Rifle Association. If we ever needed a space force, it’s now. Failing that, the president could trust his own CIA and FBI again.

Trump goes to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to round up a posse to take on the immigrants just as some of his formerly loyal deputies start to get scared off by common sense and the looming 2020 elections.

This is no joke. In the blathering words of the great bumbler himself, this is “a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul”. If they reopen the government and start paying people like the airport security officers, they could do no end of harm. We’re talking about Trump’s reputation here, not some trivial abstraction.

“When I took the oath of office, I swore to protect our country,” Trump concluded. “And that is what I will always do, so help me God.” While you’re at it, dear Lord, please help the children at the border. They’re human pawns, you know.

• Richard Wolffe is a columnist for the Guardian US