President
Donald Trump URGENT Address to the Nation on National Security from
Oval Office
LIVE: President Donald Trump URGENT Address to the Nation on National Security and Shutdown from the Oval Office
Commentary from Blackstone Intelligence
LIVE: President Donald Trump URGENT Address to the Nation on National Security and Shutdown from the Oval Office
https://www.rt.com/usa/448340-trump-shutdown-border-address/?fbclid=IwAR0OAPgld-8gBmoPDBleJhJ-afw3AhgfK4m5Ds8ITTuc9EjaA5fCVQpD5d4
US President Donald Trump stopped short of invoking emergency powers, appealing instead to Democrats for approval of his border barrier proposal by arguing that illegal immigration via Mexico was causing a humanitarian crisis.
Trump’s
address to the nation, broadcast by major networks live from the Oval
office, comes amid an ongoing partial shutdown of federal government
services, due to the White House’s insistence on Congress spending
at least $5 billion on building a border wall, which Democrats are
insistent on blocking.
Despite
speculation ahead of the speech that Trump might invoke a declaration
of national emergency and unlock sweeping presidential powers that
would allow him to command the Pentagon to build the border wall, the
president ended up asking for another meeting with congressional
Democrats to resolve the impasse.
Democrats
have repeatedly vowed Trump will “never” get a penny for the
border wall, declaring it outdated, ineffective, and “immoral.”
Trump addressed those arguments by saying the steel barrier was
proposed by professionals at the Department of Homeland Security and
the US Border Patrol. And if walls are immoral, he asked, why do
wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes?
“They
don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside. They
build walls because they love the people on the inside,” Trump
said. “The only thing immoral is for politicians to do nothing.”
The
US president went down the list of arguments about the harm of
illegal immigration, saying that it disproportionately harmed
African-Americans and Hispanics, women and children. He noted that
more Americans would die from drug overdoses this year than in the
entire Vietnam War, and said that 90 percent of those drugs comes in
via the southern border.
How
much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?
There
was nothing new, however, in the president’s address that he has
not already argued since announcing his candidacy in 2015, or over
the past two years of his term in office.
Nor
was there any evidence his rhetoric persuaded the Democrats: in their
rebuttal address, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-California)
and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said Trump was
“manufacturing a crisis” and “holding the American people
hostage," demanding once again that he cave in to their
resistance and reopen the government without funding the wall.
“The
symbol of America should be the Statue of Liberty, not a 30-foot
wall,” said Schumer, who accused Trump of “stoking fear” and
trying to “govern by temper tantrum.”
Pelosi
declared the wall to be “expensive and ineffective,” and said the
US should fund innovation and “new technology” to better police
border crossings instead.
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