This Monday morning, as the partial federal government shutdown dragged through its third full week, President Donald Trump flew down to New Orleans, Louisiana (not Nashville, as he incorrectly announced) to speak at the American Farm Bureau Federation’s convention.
While there, he offered what quickly amounted to a rambling campaign speech, walking through his familiar talking points like that we need a border wall blocking off Mexico, Democrats are ruthless obstructionists for daring to dissent, and so on. Journalist Daniel Dale summed the talk up as Trump’s “regular rambling lies.”
Trump ranted:
‘The government remains shutdown for one reason and one reason only — the Democrats will not fund border security, our safety, our national security… They will not approve measures we need to keep America safe.’
It’s remarkable that he continues to refuse to approve any government funding without billions in provisions for a border wall and blames Democrats for something he himself is actively doing. It’s quite a feat of rhetoric, and it treats the wall as some sort of inescapable divine ordinance — which it most certainly isn’t. Undocumented border crossings continue their overall downward trend, and crime that does pop up among immigrant populations isn’t any different from the crime that pops up among native-born Americans. White people commit heinous crimes too.
Still, the government remains shutdown and hundreds of thousands of Americans remain indefinitely essentially unemployed because Trump insists that an entire population should be literally walled off like he’s some kind of comic book villain.
During his time at the Farm Bureau convention, Trump indulged in plenty of that familiar egotism. He specifically asked attendees to remain seated, so that he could get standing ovations and the media wouldn’t dog him for not getting any — because somehow, that’s remotely relevant here.
He also offered the nonsense lie that one of the members of the media said he delivered on more promises than he’d actually made — however that would work.
In reality, major campaign promises that were airy to begin with remain unfulfilled. Trump said that Mexico would write a check for the border wall — despite what he claims about his past now — and well, there’s no check.
Americans like the farmers part of the organization to whom he spoke this Monday are bearing the brunt of his policies.
For months, he’s carried on with trade wars against nations all around the world, from Canada to China, and Americans have suffered. The Farm Bureau itself has estimated that just in Nebraska, up to $1 billion could have been sucked out of the local economy. Retaliatory tariffs from around the world have undercut key American products like soybeans, while American businesses who use foreign steel and aluminum have been also left out in the cold.
In 2018, struggling under the weight of cancelled and just non-existent orders as part of the trade wars, American farms saw their overall income drop by 12 percent, leaving it 40 percent below its 2013 peak.
Yet, Trump still has the gall to stand in front of Americans and say he’s sticking up for them anyway.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
