Playing fast and loose with numbers is nothing new to Donald Trump.
Just ask anyone who has heard his pitches for his properties, his estimation of his net worth, investors in his bankrupt casinos and other failed businesses, or the New York State prosecutors investigating his charity and his inheritance tax evasion schemes.
Still, CNN‘s Jake Tapper was unpleasantly surprised when President Trump made his latest in a series of attempts to instill enough fear into gullible Republican voters with his outrageous lies to get them to salvage the 2018 midterm elections for his party.
Trump — with what passes for a straight face — claimed to reporters in an interview on the White House lawn that there are 25-30 million undocumented immigrants currently residing in the United States.
“We just heard some number there that I’ve never heard,” Jake Tapper said with uncalled-for diplomacy upon watching the clip of Trump’s claims, according to RawStory.
The president did not specify out of which portion of his posterior he pulled those particular numbers, but Tapper could only compare them to the estimates given by The Federation for American Immigration Reform, a non-profit organization dedicated, like Trump himself, to reducing immigration levels in this country.
Even FAIR estimates that there are only about 12.5 million illegal immigrants actually residing in the U.S. currently, less than half of Trump’s claims.
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Trump likely made his grossly inflated estimate to try to further frighten his base of right-wing snowflakes into being so afraid of people who aren’t exactly like themselves that they’ll tear themselves away from Fox News long enough to go out and vote for any Republican vowing to protect their fragile bubble.
Not content with simply brandishing phony numbers as a fear tactic, Trump has upped the ante by committing real numbers — in terms of millions of taxpayer dollars and 15 thousand U.S. troops — to a despicable stunt military deployment on the border with Mexico to stop the caravan of refugees that has been his primary imaginary bogeyman to motivate his fragile base. For comparison’s sake, the U.S. has fewer troops currently fighting an actual army of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
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The much-hyped caravan includes many women and children and is still many weeks away from reaching the U.S. border where, under international refugee treaties that our nation has signed, they should be able to lawfully seek asylum from the violence in their Central American home countries, violence for which the U.S. has been at least partially responsible.
Trump’s use of the military to further his own political aims is exactly the type of “high crimes and misdemeanors” that our nation’s founders had in mind when they outlined the infractions that qualify a president for impeachment. However, with a Congress controlled by members of the president’s own party, Trump will never be called to account for his gross misdeeds…UNLESS YOU VOTE IN NEXT WEEK’S MIDTERM ELECTIONS TO OUST THE GOP FROM POWER!!!
You know what you have to do, so just do it.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Dominique Jackson at RawStory.
