Trump bluffs

Stop with the false claims about Texas

When the president steps foot in El Paso this morning, it’ll be the seventh time he’s visited Texas for a campaign rally.

He’s been here to look things over after Hurricane Harvey, to campaign for U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz and he’s been in and out of the state for fundraisers.

Is it too much to hope that this time he’ll learn something about the Lone Star State?

At nearly every turn, Trump’s statements and actions before and after he took office two years ago have revealed an ignorance of even the most basic aspects of life in Texas. Recall when he talked, absurdly, about the thousands of pleasure-boating Texans during Harvey who had to be saved by the Coast Guard.

In fact, they were braving storm-tossed waters to rescue neighbors.

Trump seems even more confused when he talks about the border. Take his

recent comments about El Paso and the border fence completed there in 2009.

“El Paso, Texas, used to have extremely high rates of violent crime — one of the highest in the entire country, and considered one of our nation’s most dangerous cities,” Trump said during his State of the Union address last week. “Now, immediately upon its [the fence’s] building, with a powerful barrier in place, El Paso is one of the safest cities in our country.”

That’s unequivocally wrong. All Texans know that El Paso lies directly across the border from Juarez, where murder and kidnappings have at times overwhelmed local authorities. We also know that El Paso itself has for decades been universally considered one of the safest cities in America.

The border fence completed in 2009 didn’t make that so. The crime rate, and especially the rate of violent crimes, had been falling for nearly 20 years before that fence was completed.

That El Paso has been safe for decades is borne out by more than FBI stats. Elected officials from both parties have called out Trump’s falsehood repeatedly in recent days.

“El Paso was NEVER one of the MOST dangerous cities in the U.S,” Mayor Dee Margo, a Republican, said on Twitter last week. “We’ve had a fence for 10 years and it has impacted illegal immigration and curbed criminal activity. It is NOT the sole deterrent. Law enforcement in our community continues to keep us safe.”

Does any of this really matter? We wish it didn’t. But sadly, Trump has a powerful hold on a significant swath of Americans — and their congressional representatives — who want so badly to believe his promises of greatness that they don’t bother to check the fine print.

They believe quickly and blindly. And by the time the fact-checkers weigh in, Trump will have moved to the next rally.

Last week, the president said: “Simply put: Walls work, and walls save lives.”

We’ll put it simply, too. Visitors to Texas expecting a warm welcome — whether president, peon or poseur — shouldn’t tell lies about us.