Ari Melber laid out the case against Donald Trump, the Trump shutdown, and why the shutdown itself is such a monumental broken promise, one media fails to comprehend.
After going back through Trump's record where he promised over and over again that Mexico would pay for the wall, Melber laid out the problem. The broken promise isn't whether a wall is built, but who pays for it. He even played the clip where he promised Sean Hannity he would apologize to him if Mexico didn't pay for the wall.
Trump promised Mexico would pay for it. Melber explains why that is the crux of everything.
"Trump failed," he said. "He didn't pull off the deal, he didn't apologize to Hannity."
He continued, "He turned from pressuring Mexico for pesos to pressuring the U.S. for dollars, making this shutdown a bizarre public exercise in breaking his promise."
He went on to explain the pickle Trump is in: If he re-opens the government without wall funding then it was a complete waste of time, but if he re-opens the government without any funds from Congress for the wall, he sees that as a violation of his promise. It's not.
"If it sounds like that doesn't make sense, it's because it doesn't make sense," he said. "Yet this very clear logic has escaped all kinds of pundits and politicos because you may have heard this common claim that the shutdown that breaks Trump's promise is actually Trump's standing by his promise."
I know. It's circular, but here is the crux of things: THE PROMISE IS WHO PAYS, NOT THE WALL.
Melber plays a lot of Very Serious Pundits getting this wrong, saying that by shutting the government down, Trump is serving his base. Again, he's not.
"It's not what he ran on," he insisted. "It's the total and complete violation of what he ran on which is Mexico funding the wall."
"Even as Trump breaks his wall promise, he continues to claim he's putting America first by getting other countries to meet their obligations from boots on the ground to picking up the tabs as he told our troops," he noted.
But in the end, here's the truth: "Trump's not paying the bill he promised Mexico would pay and now he wants to pass the buck to the American taxpayer." And we are not going to do that.
Pundits, take note. This is how you deal with the wall issue. You don't talk about how he's bowing to his base. You talk about how he's lying to his base and how he shut down the government to cover over his broken promise.
"Remember, we know Trump broke his promise because he told us. We know he shut down the government to keep breaking that promise because he told us. We know Trump is wrong right now in every day of this shutdown because he told us that too."
Remember that when our new Democratic House passes a bill to reopen the government without one cent for the wall. Nancy Pelosi is just holding Trump to his promises, the same way his base ought to be.
