U.S. President Donald Trump is angry. He’s more than a year into his presidency, and much to his disappointment, the nation has not exactly fallen in line with his wishes. There are some opponents to him and his agenda in his own party, but the center of opposition is, of course, outside of his party. In the Senate, it’s the Democrats who represent most of the anti-Trump sentiment.
Rather than attempting to strike some sort of compromise between himself and the Democrats, Trump is digging into his positions. In a furious video message posted to the internet on Saturday, he slammed the “resistance,” that broad term applied to a whole host of anti-Trump efforts. Thanks to his attacks on a broad range of interests, there’s been an opportunity for a large number of those efforts.
He began the video message by saying:
‘Senate Democrats call it the resistance — they’re resisting the will of the American voter and it is not good. From day one, Senate Democrats have shamelessly obstructed, stalled, and filibustered the confirmations of hundreds of talented men and women who are eager to come to Washington, D.C. to make a difference. They want to serve our country. My nominees face a longer average confirmation wait than any in the history of our country.’
There’s a long pattern that the president continues with here of claiming travails his administration is facing to be the greatest in American history. However, just because he continues on with a pattern doesn’t mean that it’s on point or that he’s telling the truth.
He claimed there to be more than 300 nominees awaiting Senate confirmation in his video address posted this Saturday, but it’s not clear where he got that number from — as can be said about any one of a number of other pieces of information that he’s shared.
The Washington Post reports that as of May 31 of this year, there were only some 183 nominations that had been sent to the Senate without the nominees themselves having yet been confirmed.
As for the president’s claim that the confirmation delays faced by his nominees have proven to be the greatest in American history, The Post shares that the Trump admin delays are longer than any other average delay in the last several administrations, but not by a lot. Obama faced an average wait time of 67 days, and Trump faces one of 86 days.
Speaking in his video message on Saturday, the president wasn’t finished attempting to bend the truth to his wishes. He also went after Democrats for opposing his border control measures, commenting:
‘They don’t want border security for two reasons. Number one they don’t care about it, number two, they’re afraid it’s going to make me and the Republicans look good and they don’t want that.’
He claimed them to have blocked everything he had put forward on the subject of border security and immigration reform, but that’s not the whole story. Democrats have presented their own plans at times, but the president has rejected those. In one infamous instance of such, the president dismissed countries Democrats wanted to favor as “shithole countries.”
Overall then, the president is, as mentioned already, digging into his positions. Those positions include a denial of reality as a core tenet.
Watch his weekly address below.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
