Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
By Dr. Tom Borelli originally posted at ConservativeReview.com
The news coverage of the border crisis and President Trump’s speech to the nation proves the agenda-driven media can be the enemy of the people.
The left-wing media is so intent on destroying President Trump that it enthusiastically twists and manipulates facts without any regard for the consequences of an insecure border to Americans or the damage of harming the credibility of the president.
Before and after President Trump’s speech, the anti-Trump media was actively trying to undermine the president. The talking heads on MSNBC led the way. The morning before the nationwide address, “Morning Joe” co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski wanted to silence President Trump by urging networks not to broadcast the prime-time address because they were confident the president was going to lie.
“Why in the world would the networks run Donald Trump’s address tonight when we know that Donald Trump is going to be using it to spread these lies?” asked Scarborough.
Brzezinski passionately responded, “Do they want to run the promise of more lies, more misleading statistics, more twisting of reality, mindless confrontation, all for the sake of defending Trump’s dark, twisted fantasy of a wall on the Mexican border to fight an enemy that doesn’t exist, except in the most fevered swamps of American politics — do they want to do that for ratings?”
She added that “the networks should refuse to turn over the airwaves to Donald Trump tonight for what they know, objectively, to be a steady stream of lies.”
The MSNBC segment on the president’s address the following morning opened with a video montage mocking him. The editors used a series of video clips from a rally speech where the president was joking about being presidential, and after each joke, they spliced in video from the president’s nationwide address from the Oval Office. Pure propaganda, with the goal of demeaning President Trump.
The remainder of the segment was a discussion. The co-hosts and assembled anti-Trump cheerleaders reiterated the conclusion from the morning before, that the speech did not merit a prime-time address and did not justify the wall. Notably absent was any identification of the “steady stream of lies” that Brzezinski was so confident would be delivered.
MSNBC was not alone in the effort to demean President Trump. The Washington Post had a “fact-checker” standing by to analyze statements made by the president.
During the address, President Trump said 266,000 aliens were arrested “with criminal records” during the last two years. The fact-checker determined the arrest “numbers add up” but said the statistic was misleading because it “includes all types of crimes, including nonviolent offenses such as illegal entry or reentry.”
So even when the president is correct, he is wrong, because according to The Washington Post, a crime is only a crime when it is violent. The “analysis” did not disprove the number of “charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) fiscal year 2018 report provides a list of charges and convictions from arrests, including 80,730 DUIs, 76,585 dangerous drugs, and 50,753 assault.
The statement that President Trump made that Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., voted for a “physical barrier” before he was president was also a problem for the fact-checker. That too was misleading because “the fence they voted for is not as substantial as the wall Trump is proposing.”
Wrong. During the speech, President Trump stated he would yield the concrete wall for a “steel barrier.”
The fact-checker also challenged the president’s statement that 90 percent of heroin comes from the southern border. The focus of the challenge was that “virtually all of it comes through legal points of entry” and not between the ports of entry. The fact-checker concluded that therefore “Trump’s wall would do little to halt drug trafficking.”
Wrong. While it’s true that nine times the amount of heroin comes through the ports of entry as between the entry points, a significant amount of dangerous drugs gets into the U.S. around the ports of entry. In fiscal year 2018, the Border Patrol seized 10,382 pounds of methamphetamine, 6,423 pounds of cocaine and 332 pounds of fentanyl — over an eighty percent increase from the prior year.
Keep in mind these are the drugs that were seized. Who knows how many pounds escaped border agents?
Just on the basis of drugs brought in and crimes committed by illegal aliens, there is a border crisis. By mocking President Trump and twisting the facts to minimize the security risk to Americans from a porous border shows the media can be the enemy of the people.
Dr. Tom Borelli is a contributor to Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @tomborelli.
