When Donald Trump addressed the nation from the Oval Office Tuesday night, he hit every familiar talking point about the supposed “crisis” at our southern border, save one. Trump failed to mention the terrorist threat he’s been lying about for months, and all it took was Fox News anchor Chris Wallace‘s utter humiliation of Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Of the 1,122 words Trump spoke Tuesday night, precisely zero of them were any variation of “terrorist” or “terrorism,” which is coincidentally the number of terrorists that Trump’s own State Department says have entered the country through the southern border.
Trump’s address came two days after Wallace interviewed Sanders on Fox News Sunday, and stomped all over the terrorism talking point like a Riverdance troupe on a stage full of cockroaches.
He began by pressing Sanders on Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen‘s claim that Customs and Border Protection “has stopped over 3,000 what we call special interest aliens trying to come into the country on the southern border,” pointing out that “special interest aliens are just people who have come from countries that have ever produced a terrorist, they’re not terrorists themselves.”
“We know that roughly nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally, and we know that our most vulnerable point of entry is southern border,” Sanders began, but Wallace cut her off.
“I know the statistic, I didn’t
Three times during the interview, Wallace stopped Sanders cold by citing a Trump State Department report that said there are zero terrorists infiltrating the southern border.
In a media age where cascades of lies go unchallenged, it is tempting to view Wallace’s performance as heroic, but it was actually an example of the kind of preparation and tenacity that ought to be a minimum requirement for every journalist.
But it wasn’t simply the debunking, thorough though it was, that made Wallace’s segment so powerful. People have been debunking Trump’s lies about terrorism at the border for months, and even Vice President Mike Pence‘s office was forced to admit he had made false claims about the subject.
And in October, CNN White House correspondent Jim Acosta busted Trump live in the Oval Office, forcing Trump to admit “there’s no proof of anything” related to his claims of terrorists.
It was the perfect storm of a thoroughly researched interview, Wallace’s status as a Fox News anchor, and Sanders’ utter inability to counter him that helped do this talking point in, and even that was almost not enough.
Even after that interview, Pence and Nielsen continued to try and polish this turd. At a briefing on
The nail in this lie’s coffin was likely the fact that White House counselor Kellyanne Conway was forced to admit that the claim was an “unfortunate misstatement,” but that surrender could never have occurred without Wallace’s work and influence as a Fox News anchor.
None of this should encourage people to think that there is any way to get Trump to stop lying. His Oval Office address was tightly scripted and likely influenced by Conway, but there’s a 4,000 percent chance that Trump will resurrect some version of this lie in short order.
Even after CNN’s Jake Tapper busted Kellyanne Conway for lying about military pay raises live on the air, Trump not only continued to tell the lie, he expanded on it. During his surprise Christmas visit to troops in Iraq, Trump claimed he had secured a ten percent pay raise for the military, and that it was the first pay raise “in more than ten years.”
But the military has been receiving pay raises every year, and the Trump increase is less than three percent.
No, the lesson here is that occasions like the Wallace interview need to become the floor, not the ceiling. Every journalist needs to approach Trump and his mouthpieces armed to
Trump won’t stop lying, but he and his administration will begin to pay a greater price for those lies, and the public will get what they deserve most from the press that’s supposed to serve them: the truth.