Get out of the boat

I’m going to post a couple of highlights from Trump’s announcement today that he was tearing up the Constitution because of a fake national emergency (Let the record reflect that Ann Coulter spoke eleven consecutive completely true words today, which is probably a new record: “The only national emergency is that our president is an idiot.”).

But you should force yourself to read the whole thing.  Because we all have an understandable tendency to look away from this national catastrophe.  Electing Trump president was pretty much the same thing as electing Dennis Rodman president, i.e., a washed-up celebrity from the 1980s with obvious mental health issues and a bizarre affection for the North Korean regime.  Really the only significant difference now is the tattoos.  (To be fair Rodman was actually good at something once upon a time, so comparing him to Trump is kind of unfair in that regard).  We are in a completely insane situation, and we need to look at it in the face every day, rather than denying how crazy it actually all is.

So anyway:

When you look and when you listen to politicians, in particular, certain Democrats, they say it all comes through the port of entry. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s just a lie. It’s all a lie. They say walls don’t work. Walls work 100 percent. Whether it’s El Paso—I really was smiling because the other night I was in El Paso, we had a tremendous crowd, tremendous crowd, and I asked the people, many of whom were from El Paso, but they came from all over Texas, and I asked, them, I said, “Let me ask you as a crowd, when the wall went up, was it better?” You were there, some of you. It was not only better, it was like 100 percent better. You know what they did. But that’s only one example. There were so many examples. In El Paso, they have close to 2,000 murders right on the other side of the wall, and they have 23 murders. That’s a lot of murders, but it’s not close to 2,000 murders right on the other side of the wall in Mexico.

Annual homicides in El Paso, 2014-2018

2014: 21

2015: 17

2016: 16

2017: 20

2018: 23

Last year, 70,000 Americans were killed at least—I think the number is ridiculously low—by drugs including meth and heroin and cocaine, fentanyl. Now one of the things that I did with President Xi in China when I met him in Argentina at a summit before I started talking about the trade—it was a trade meeting, it went very well. But before I talked about trade I talked about something more important. I said, “Listen, we have tremendous amounts of fentanyl coming into our country, kills tens of thousands of people, I think far more than anybody registers. And I’d love you to declare it a lethal drug and put it on your criminal list.” And their criminal list is much tougher than our criminal list. Their criminal list, a drug dealer gets a thing called the death penalty. Our criminal list a drug dealer gets a thing called—how about a fine.

And when I asked President Xi, I said, “You have a drug problem?” [He said,] “No, no, no.” I said, “You have 1.4 billion people, what do you mean you have no drug problem?” [He said,] “No, we don’t have a drug problem.” I said, “Why?” [He said,] “Death penalty. We give death penalty to people that sell drugs.” End of problem. What do we do? We set up blue-ribbon committees, lovely men and women. They sit around the table. They have lunch, they eat, they dine, and they waste a lot of time. So if we want to get smart, we can get smart. You can end the drug problem. You can end it a lot faster than you think.

In response to a question:

“I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster,” he said. “And I don’t have to do it for the election. I’ve already done a lot of wall for the election. 2020. And the only reason we’re up here talking about this is because of the election—because they want to try to win an election, which it looks like they’re not going to be able to do.”

This is of course the most direct possible contradiction of the legally-crucial claim that he’s doing an end-run around Congress because there’s a national emergency.