Donald Trump’s “national emergency” stunt goes off the rails

| 8:08 pm EST January 11, 2019
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Donald Trump hinted a week ago that he might declare a “national emergency” and somehow use it to get his border wall funded and built, even though national emergency declarations don’t work that way, and the courts would immediately shut him down if he tried. It was the emptiest, most laughable phony threat Trump has made to date. Now, after the media spent a week falsely hyping the phony story, Trump is admitting it’s precisely that.

Donald Trump announced today, for all the television cameras to see, that he will (of course) not be declaring a national emergency over his border wall. In other news, water is wet and ice is cold. This was never, ever, ever a story. But because the media jumped on the ratings-friendly narrative, and most of the public didn’t bother to challenge the media’s fear mongering, Trump managed to get mileage out of this fake threat for an entire week.

Trump says he still reserves the right to declare a national emergency in the future. That’s the exact same thing as Trump threatening to have a reincarnated Jabba the Hutt build his wall; it’s simply not a real thing. It’s significant and disturbing that Trump even (falsely) threatened to declare a state of emergency, but the media had a responsibility to put it within the context of it not being an actual possibility.

This comes in the same week we’ve seen a false report that Rod Rosenstein was resigning as soon as William Barr is confirmed (Rosenstein himself shot this down and confirmed he’s staying for as long as Robert Mueller is still at it), and a false report that Ruth Bader Ginsburg was preparing to resign. Something is in the water this week when it comes to the media repeating the fake news that’s being leaked from the Trump regime, and we all need to be as vigilant as ever.