Donald Trump reels off immigration scare stories in Oval Office address; Democrats swat him down in stinging rebuttal

New York: A Hail Mary presidential address from a bully pulpit on steroids. That’s what we got today on the Donald Trump parallel reality prime time show from the Oval Office as the US president exploited his powerful office to reel off a litany of scare stories about illegal immigration and a non-existent “humanitarian crisis” at the US border while 800,000 federal government workers are working without pay since 22 December last year because of the ongoing shutdown over Trump’s tantrum over getting his $5.7 billion for a border wall. “This is a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul”, Trump said, reading off a teleprompter and retreating from his big beautiful “wall” and introducing a Wall version 3.0. Now, he’s saying he’ll take a “barrier” for a deal. Trump’s shtick is getting old and boring, Republicans are slowly breaking from his creed, the first rumblings are being heard today. Conflating the cultural fears of many white voters and reality-free nonsense that he passed off as data, Trump on Tuesday night griped about his all time favourite poison arrow - immigration. Trump fooled nobody, the racial fears he spouted today are merely a preview of the racial demagoguery that will headline his 2020 campaign. He milked national television networks to deliver a divisive speech certain to rile up his most loyal voters. This was not a national crisis speech, it was Trump using the Oval Office to find an emergency exit out of the soon-to-be longest US Govt shutdown in the last 50 years which is already the fourth-longest in history. [caption id=“attachment_5860661” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Donald Trump during his 8 January Oval Office address. AP[/caption] “At the request of the Democrats, it will be a steel barrier instead of a concrete wall. The border wall would very quickly pay for itself. The wall will also be paid for, indirectly, by the great trade deal we have made with Mexico. Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis”, Trump said. The Democratic rebuttal by Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer tore into Trump’s claims saying he is spreading “malice” and showed him a mirror that says Trump is the sticking point here and nobody else. We need to build the wall, the wall need not be a wall, Mexico will pay for the wall and we need to pay for the same wall that Mexico is already funding - we got all versions today from Trump about the phantom wall or unicorn or whatever we choose to call it. “Pure and unadulterated rubbish” is how Donald Trump’s critics are reacting to the US president’s unhinged address laying the groundwork to bypass a Democratic Congress after threatening all week to invoke a national emergency to prove his eagerness to build the metaphorical (or maybe real) wall along the US-Mexico border. The Oval Office address is a very specific genre and the reason it was marshalled today belongs in some bizarre comic book version. This one today blurs the lines between the partisan, false and even illegal. This is the Trump angst laid bare, a desperation that has nothing to do with any epochal moment in American life, politics or security. Think John F Kennedy after the Cuban missile crisis, Richard Nixon’s resignation or George Bush after the 9/11 attacks and then compare the Trump show tonight. He’s terrified that his base will leave him, he’s terrified of Robert Mueller and today’s prime time outburst is how Trump deals with his fear: appeal to the worst instincts of his least educated voters. This is something he loves doing in his raucous political rallies, there’s no reason for Trump to hijack the most revered physical space in the 18 acres of the White House to whip up the American people with imagined crises coming from immigrant invaders threatening to degrade the country. Well, he just did. Cornered on multiple flanks both political and legal, this is Trump’s attempt to shoot the moon with what was a totem for his campaign, and hope people will buy it or maybe skeptics will swing over to his side. Nothing of that sort is happening. If anything, Trump is keeping far right rabble rousers like Rush Limbaugh — who goaded Trump to shutdown the government — and Ann Coulter very happy. In real time, critics are tearing into Trump’s claims of “a humanitarian crisis at the Southern border”, panning the US president for possible executive overreach. Former American presidents like Roosevelt and Lincoln and Truman in war situations have stretched the law to see how far they could go but this is the first time in American history that a politician is pushing the limits of the Oval Office address to see how far he can take a political gambit via reality television. “I can do it if I want”, Trump has said multiple times in the last week about declaring a national emergency. He stopped several steps short of that today. If Donald Trump was hoping for a quiet news day where he could play the star role, the Russia probe swept back into the headlines after a recent lull, inching closer to his closest family members, including his eldest son and son-in-law. Hours before Trump took the world’s loudest megaphone to justify a non-emergency as a crisis, federal investigators indicted the Russian lawyer who met with Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Junior and Jared Kushner in Trump Tower New York during the 2016 campaign. That’s a prelude to what’s to come. If Robert Mueller’s playing chess, the prosecutors in New York may be his queen. “Maybe Trump’s emphasis on building a wall is to hold back the walls of the Russia probe closing in,” is how Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe explains the Trump spectacle tonight. Coming back to Trump, what is this “wall”, anyway? What does Trump want built? There isn’t a blueprint out in public domain, there’s no prototype of what it should look like. Not just average Americans, even Congress members are scratching their heads. So, what’s Trump trying to do here? At a more straightforward level, Trump is trying to see how Republicans could agree to open up the government without looking like they’ve caved to Democrats. Does Trump care? More likely, he would delight in the filter-free messaging to his base that he’s sticking to his bedrock promise. Popcorn tubs came out, the jokes wrote themselves and one of Karl Marx’s most quoted statements - that history repeats itself, “the first as tragedy and then as farce”, is trending on talk shows during Trump’s first Oval Office address as president. So, why did Trump do this Oval Office ‘address’? There wasn’t anything new, Trump is circling back the same old horror stories he’s been saying all week and telling his cronies to spout, so what was the big deal? White House sources say Trump wasn’t for this speech but his aides wanted him to do it. If Trump agreed reluctantly, he decided he might as well stir the witches brew from the Oval office. Meanwhile, Robert Mueller and the New York investigators are rapidly closing in on Trump’s front porch. Fear, Trump has repeatedly said to insiders, is real power. It’s all coming full circle. You can see it on Donald Trump’s drawn face in the video embedded on the top of this story.