Crazy Nancy Pelosi went so far as to call the idea of a border wall “an immorality.”6 She doesn’t explain how on God’s earth a wall can be immoral. She immediately followed up her comment with, “It’s the least effective way to protect the border, and the most costly. I can’t think of any reason why anyone would think it’s a good idea—unless this has something to do with something else.” The “something else” is Pelosi’s sophomoric suggestion that the president views the wall as a sign of his manhood.7 There seems no bottom to the depths to which the Democrats will sink in their desperate, unhinged plot to oppose President Trump.
Pelosi never got around to explaining why the wall is immoral. This won’t be the Berlin Wall, which was designed to keep people inside an oppressive regime. On the contrary, it’s designed merely to keep people from avoiding legal points of entry where they will be let into the country, provided they are not criminals or carrying dangerous diseases or drugs. What is immoral is putting children and other vulnerable people in harm’s way by encouraging them to travel through deserts and other hostile environments so they can avoid legitimate immigration processes that are in place to protect the native population and legal immigrants.
Even if Pelosi were right about the wall being ineffective or costly, that has nothing to do with its supposed immorality. If merely being costly and ineffective were immoral, then everything the Democrats have ever done would be immoral. But one can be morally above reproach and still be wasteful and incompetent. In the case of building a wall on the border, which even by the most inflated estimates would cost far less than one percent of the federal budget, there is no question of immorality, cost, or effectiveness. We have laws against illegal immigration. A physical barrier on the border would be a relatively inexpensive and highly effective way to enforce those laws. That’s why the Democrats don’t want it.
The truth is the Democrats oppose building the wall because it would be effective, and they know it. How could a thirty-foot-high wall not make it more difficult to cross a border than… nothing? If there were a thirty-foot wall around the building you work in, would it be harder for you to get to your desk? Of course, it would.
We don’t have to rely on this intuitive argument. There are plenty of real-world examples of the effectiveness of border walls. Terrorist attacks on Israel dropped by 90 percent after it built a wall along the border with the Palestinian West Bank. Morocco put a stop to the insurgency and terrorist campaign waged against it with a 1,700-mile system of sand berms, fences, minefields, and ditches.8 In fact, contrary to the counterintuitive mantra chanted ad nauseam by the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) that border walls are ineffective, the number of them built around the world has exploded in the post–World War II era. At the end of that war, there were seven border walls in the world. Today, there are seventy-seven.9
We even have proof border walls work right here in this country. I interviewed both current Acting Director of ICE, Mark Morgan, and his predecessor, Ron Vitiello, on my Fox News show, Justice with Judge Jeanine. They consider what is going on at the border both a humanitarian and a national security crisis, just as President Trump does. The sheer volume of people is overwhelming the ability of our law enforcement and social service agencies to find room to house them.
“Right now, we have the cartels that are helping smuggle children,” said Morgan during his appearance on my show. “We actually have children being rented, coming across as fake families, then being recycled and re-rented coming across. It’s outrageous. Congress should get together to fix this.”
The Democrats will vote for border security measures as long as they don’t work, which really isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Nothing they vote for works. Just look at Obamacare. But as I said before, this is more than derangement—it’s derangement by design. Approving border security measures that don’t work allows them to appear as if they are truly interested in protecting our borders while continuing their agenda to fundamentally change the United States, demographically and politically.
The border wall isn’t the only sensible border security measure the Democrats seek to shut down. The want to abolish ICE, the agency tasked with enforcing our immigration laws once people have either evaded CBP or overstayed their visas. This complements their resistance to a wall or any effective physical barrier perfectly. Make it as easy as possible for people to enter illegally and then eliminate the government’s means to enforce immigration laws once they’re here.
Trump Throws the Democrats a Rope
Contrary to the tortured visions of the ongoing liberal fever dream, President Trump’s policies are not fascist or even “extreme right.” As Bill Bennett astutely observed, the president’s policies are “conservative, but mostly traditionally so with a good dash of moderation and compromise.”10 How else could one describe the president’s willingness to accept a mere $5.7 billion in funding for a border wall, when building the wall he campaigned on would cost $20 to $30 billion? He’s even compromised on building a wall, per se, opting to listen to border security professionals who told him a steel slat fence they could see through would be more effective.11
He’s also made yet another offer on Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), in exchange for merely doing what the nonpartisan Border Patrol says would help them do their jobs better. As usual, when push comes to shove, the Democrats show how much they really care about the so-called DREAMers, who are people brought into this country illegally by their parents or others when they were still minors. Some of them were brought over our border as infants and have been here ever since.
Think about where we’ve been with this issue. President Trump inherited a mess, the result of President Obama’s—or should I say “King Obama’s”?—pen-and-phone decree, granting these people temporary amnesty based on his will alone, without legislative action by Congress. These people are still illegal aliens per the letter of the law, so Obama was literally abandoning his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws of this country.
President Trump rescinded Obama’s unconstitutional executive action in September 2017 and called on Congress to do its job in addressing the situation through legislation.12 One might think he would at least get a grudging nod from the liberal media for undoing this executive power grab and returning legislative power to Congress, where the Constitution clearly delegates it. But no, the deranged Left who call the president a “dictator” out of one side of their mouths accused the president of “punting” the issue to Congress.13
This is what we’re dealing with, folks. We’re through the looking glass where a president completely usurps the legislative power delegated to Congress and writes laws with his “pen and phone” to thunderous applause from the supposed champions of democracy. Then, when a subsequent president rescinds the unconstitutional executive power and returns it to Congress, he’s called a dictator. Deranged, devious, or both? You tell me.
Did Congress do its job and pass a bill to address DACA? Of course not, because the Democrats don’t want a deal on DACA. They want to use the DACA aliens for political purposes, keeping them perpetual victims of a president who has offered to sign deals offering relief to millions more DACA aliens than Obama ever did.
The president’s first offer was to grant legal status to over 700,000 DACA aliens in exchange for funding for a border wall and other border security measures.14 The Democrats rejected it. A few months later, the president offered the same type of deal for almost 2 million immigrants—not only the 700,000 who had applied for legal status under the program since 2012, but an additional 1.1 million who hadn’t yet applied.15 The Democrats rejected that, too.
Finally, this past January, with the government shut down and 800,000 federal workers not being paid, the president made a third version of the offer. Agree to a fraction of the funding needed for what is now proposed as a steel slat fence on the border—a mere $5.7 billion in a federal budget of over $4 trillion—and he would grant temporary reli
ef to DACA aliens with an eye toward a permanent solution when the government reopened.
The Democrats rejected this offer before the president even made it, calling it a “nonstarter.”16 Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer went so far as to call it “more hostage taking.” What more proof does anyone need that they will never agree to anything this president proposes, even when he is proposing something they say they want?
The government shutdown and the whole, far-Left Resistance is based on a Donald Trump that doesn’t exist, one they made up in their minds during a postelection bout of derangement that still hasn’t worn off. The president took a strong position on border security, but he’s offered more than an olive branch in trying to reach a compromise. He’s thrown the Democrats a rope with which they could have pulled themselves back up from the cliff they’ve jumped off. Instead, they used it to hang themselves.
You could say the president played them like a fiddle, but that’s far too understated. It was more like a symphony. The Democrats were high-fiving each other over an apparent political victory with the shutdown, for which polls showed the president taking more blame from the public than the Democrats.17 The Democrats had a full house, but the president had four aces. He knew that on the core issue of border security, the American public was with him. A Rasmussen poll in January showed two-thirds of Americans considered border security a serious issue and almost half thought the government wasn’t doing enough about it, up from 43 percent just five months earlier.18
In other words, the shutdown was doing precisely what the president hoped it would: get Americans to take a hard look at border security and start thinking about whether more must be done. President Trump’s core supporters have always known this is the crucial issue. During the shutdown, the rest of America started waking up to it, too.
Trump Turns the Tables
The Democrats started premature victory laps when President Trump signed a deal January 25 to reopen the government for three weeks without getting any new funding for a physical barrier on the southern border. The New York Times called it a “Surprise Retreat,”19 while the Washington Post called it “a major victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi.”20 But while liberals rejoiced over what they saw as a Trump defeat, Pelosi and New York Senator Chuck Schumer were reserved in their comments. They knew they had only won a round. The fight was far from over.
With the government reopened temporarily and the Democrats afforded another opportunity to put aside their petty resistance to anything the president suggests, the fight entered what they call in boxing “the championship rounds.” You’ll never guess who was ready with his best punches.
When Donald Trump stepped to the podium to deliver his State of the Union address on February 5, 2019, no one knew what to expect, at least in terms of public reaction. We knew what to expect from the Democrats in Congress: silence at best, overt contempt for the president at worst. We got some of the latter with Nancy Pelosi’s sarcastic applause, if that was how it was intended.21 The Left-wing media took it that way, with Washington Post columnist Monica Hesse atwitter over “the exquisite shade of Nancy Pelosi’s applause at the State of the Union.” Hesse even praised comedian Patton Oswalt’s tweet congratulating Pelosi for “inventing the f*** you clap.”22
The president is never one to shrink from a fight, but he wasn’t going to let Pelosi drag him down to her petty level that night. Instead, he forced her to rise to her feet and applaud genuinely, simply by accurately stating his administration’s results after two years:
No one has benefitted more from our thriving economy than women, who have filled 58 percent of the new jobs created in the last year. All Americans can be proud that we have more women in the workforce than ever before—and exactly one century after the Congress passed the Constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in the Congress than ever before.23
A large group of female congresswomen on the Democrat side of the aisle, dressed in white to celebrate the hundredth anniversary year of the Nineteenth Amendment, were already on their feet cheering when the president reported on how well women were thriving in the job market under his administration. When he acknowledged the record number of women in Congress, even Nancy Pelosi had no choice but to stand and applaud. Soon, the entire hall erupted into chants of “USA! USA!” For a moment, there was unity and joy.
It wasn’t the first time the president has acknowledged the accomplishments of people he vehemently disagrees with politically. For all their unhinged wailing about the president “preaching hate” or being “divisive,” it is the Left who can’t separate political disagreements from personal ones. When the Democrats won a majority in Congress and there were murmurs about Nancy Pelosi not being reelected Speaker of the House, the president spoke up for her. “I think she deserves it. She’s fought long and hard, she’s a very capable person, and you know, you have other people shooting at her trying to take over the speakership,” the president said.24
He also had kind words for Bernie Sanders on the day Sanders announced he would again run for the Democrat Party nomination for president. “Personally, I think he missed his time,” said the president. “But I like Bernie because he is one person that you know on trade, he sort of would agree on trade.”25
Can you imagine anyone from the Democrat Party putting politics aside to say something nice about Donald Trump, or a Republican Speaker of the House? It just goes to show that even the Left’s claims about the president’s personality are fake news. This is a man who can separate politics from personal relationships and would like to get along with everyone. If you notice, he never hits first in a political fight. He just hits hardest.
He went on to hit hard for the rest of his historic address. He talked about an economy growing twice as fast as it was when he took office, with African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American unemployment all at the lowest point since they started measuring those groups. He talked about groundbreaking criminal justice reform and the first-ever progress in making our trade relationship with China fair to the American people. He spoke about the defeat of ISIS, which controlled over twenty thousand square miles of territory when he took office.
He told the truth about the crisis at our southern border and implored Congress to act, perhaps knowing they wouldn’t. But he wasn’t speaking just to Congress. He was speaking to an American public that knew it had been ignored on this issue and, deep down, knew the president was right.
In another defining moment of the speech, President Trump took direct aim at the far Left, which has become mainstream in the Democrat Party:
Here, in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country. America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion, domination, and control. We are born free, and we will stay free. Tonight, we renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country.26
Again, the shouts of “USA! USA!” reverberated throughout the hall. Bernie Sanders scowled at the camera, but Chuck Schumer rose to his feet. Once again, Nancy Pelosi was forced to applaud.
A CNN poll immediately following the address showed it received an astounding 76 percent approval rating from the viewing audience.27 I wasn’t a bit surprised. Americans have an instinctual affinity for the truth, and the president spoke the truth with sincerity and conviction.
It’s simple, folks. What do you want? Should America be a nation-state, should we be a country defined by borders, or should we simply be a repository for anyone who wants to come here? If we are a repository for anyone to come here, should we also have to pay for their education, health care, housing, food stamps, and yes, even Social Security? And should they get a free college education, while American kids must pay for theirs? And of course, should non-citizens get a driver’s license and the right to vote? Does being an American citizen mean nothing anymore?
CHAPTER EIGHT
Invasion at the Border
I have only
one question about the national security and humanitarian crises on our southern border: Why are we even having this conversation?
We are so past the talking stage, but as expected, Washington is mired down in politics and word games. Their reason is not only delusional, it’s downright dangerous. They simply don’t care about what’s right for you and me and our families. Our pocketbooks, our health, our safety, our security. The Democrat bozos in Washington only care about winning, resisting, getting reelected, and getting revenge against Trump. It’s all a game to them and you and I are pawns in the middle.
I have a message for these socialists in Democrat clothing: don’t tell me that we need open borders or that walls or steel barriers, which we haven’t even tried, don’t work. I’ve got news for you: nothing that you’ve done so far has worked. And don’t patronize me and tell me, “It’s not who we are to turn people away.” Really? Are we not a sovereign nation? Are we not entitled to reinforce our own borders? Or at least establish where the United States ends and the rest of the world begins? Why are we granting priority to those who want to sneak into our country illegally?
I’d ask Beto O’Rourke, but I’m not sure he’d answer in a language I understand after his cringeworthy first Democrat debate performance on June 26. Beto pandered to the Hispanic vote by answering in both English and Spanish, prompting Stephen Colbert—whom I rarely agree with—to quip, “He’s either trying to lock up the Hispanic vote or he’s running for embarrassing dad at a Mexican restaurant.”1
What Beto, Elizabeth Warren, Julián Castro, and others were proposing is preposterous in any language: decriminalizing illegal immigration. These radical Democrats sit in the House of Representatives and promote lawlessness over the rule of law. If that’s the case, we don’t need them anymore. Their job is to pass laws. And if they violate the very laws they’ve actually passed and then refuse to pass laws to end this crisis, then, what the hell are we paying them for?
Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America Page 11