Trump, Oppn tussle on TV over border wall crisis
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump used his first televised national address from the Oval Office to blame Democrats for the government shutdown and to seek funding for a wall, telling Americans there was a humanitarian “crisis of the heart and soul” at the Us-mexico border.
Trump mentioned the killing of Indian-origin police officer Ronil Singh by an illegal immigrant in California on Christmas Eve as he listed out statistics of murders, sexual crimes and trafficking. Trump said he had proposed a plan to the Congress with a series of steps to boost border security. Among them was a request for $5.7 billion for a wall, the dispute over which has partially shut down the government for 19 days as on Wednesday.
Democrats pushed back just minutes later, also in a national address, laying the blame back at the President’s door, accusing him of throwing “temper tantrums” to have his way, manufacturing a crisis and misleading Americans with his counterfactual claims.
Trump’s choice of the grandeur and gravitas of the setting had triggered speculation that he could announce a national emergency. He didn’t, and chose to make a case that the nation was facing a crisis on the border and that Democrats were denying him the funding to deal with it and had precipitated a shutdown to prevent him from what he had been elected to do—end illegal immigration through the southern border.
Fact-checkers counted off multiple false and misleading claims in Trump’s nine-minute speech which he read off a prompter and not impromptu, which is when he tends to get adventurous with the truth.
“At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall,” he said. Democrats have not made any such suggestion, and opposed any barrier at the border. Chuck Schumer, the top Senate Democrat, in a rebuttal jointly delivered with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, said he would like the US to be seen as the land of the Statue of Liberty and not a 30-foot wall.
Pelosi slammed Trump for holding “hostage critical services for the health, safety and well-being of the American people and withhold the paychecks of 800,000 innocent workers across the nation, many of them veterans.”
“He promised to keep government shut down for ‘months or years’, no matter whom it hurts. That’s just plain wrong.”