Once again, Donald Trump displays that he is either absolutely incompetent or such a casual liar that he no longer cares whether people know that he knows he’s lying. Call me cynical, but I think he’s lying on purpose, but the possibility remains that he really is as dumb as a sack of hammers. His last major falsehood would certainly support the theory.
During a speech Monday morning to a gathering of state governors, Trump once again launched into his well-practiced rhetoric about the “crisis” at the border between the United States and Mexico. It’s perfectly normal for Trump to continue to use debunked numbers and statistics well after they’ve been proven wrong — even tasking his top advisor Kellyanne Conway with creating a term for them early on in his presidency: “Alternative facts.”
But in the speech, Trump didn’t just spout false numbers — he actually directly reversed, whether purposely or not, the actual numbers he should have been referring to. It made the question “is he lying or stupid” just that much harder to answer on Monday when he told the gathered crowd,
Nintey percent of the drugs don’t come through the port of entry. Ninety percent of the drugs and the big stuff goes out to the desert.”
As I noted, that’s actually an inversion of the truth — ninety percent of drugs do come through ports of entry, as evidenced by the recent string of huge busts, including the biggest meth bust ever performed at the southern border in just the last few weeks. Trump’s own government statistics all show this.
Was he reading it wrong? Was he disagreeing with it in real time? Was he so nervous that he would accidentally say the correct numbers and undermine his own need for a border wall that he memorized the fact in reverse?
Regardless of the reason for his complete mischaracterization of the main method of smuggling drugs, the fact is even his supporters know at this point that his speeches are at odds with what the rest of the government, even people he appointed himself, says about the transfer of hard drugs from Mexico into the United States.
Featured image via screen capture
