political brief’s fact checking of the president’s address.

The official Political Brief brief’s on fire ratings are in.

We give Trump an 87.5% truthfulness rating for his Oval Office speech last night. Some misses included his stat on ICE arrests of criminals. The best number we could find was 158,581, not 266,000. Still a significant amount. 

He gave stats about the costs to society of all drug use, but all drug use doesn’t come from drugs brought over the border. He is correct that 90% of heroin comes over the Southern border, but much of it is smuggled in through legal ports of entry.

I haven’t seen the stat on unaccompanied minors crossing in December, so we can’t verify his claim of 20,000. The previous average was about 5,000 a month.

Pelosi and Schumer didn’t do quite as well. Their rebuttal contained a great deal of hyperbole and emotion, but little in the way of facts. Many of their statements were simply perpetuation of narrative, not statements of fact. They get a 40% truthfulness rating.

They repeated the favorite Democrat talking point that it’s innocent women and children trying to cross the border illegally. The truth is that most illegal immigrants, and the vast majority of the Caravan, are young men. 

The pair made several unverified claims about Trump’s motivations and methods, including pre-prepared statements about his use of fear over facts. However, they did not provide any compelling evidence to dispute the facts he laid out and instead appealed to emotion and narrative.

They laid the entire blame for the shutdown on Trump. This is not factually correct. Although we gave them points for the fact that Trump could cave, we dinged them on their assertions that only Trump compromising could end the shut down. As they say, it takes two to tango.

We did not ding them for this, but Schumer is incorrect in his characterization of the statue of liberty. As a matter of fact, illegal aliens did not flow through Ellis Island. The “Island of Tears” as they called it at the time saw people attempting to legally emigrate, families separated, and many turned away. In fact, as symbolism goes, the Statue of Liberty is exactly what Trump has had in mind when he’s talked about a “beautiful wall with a wide open gate”. Trump does not oppose legal immigration, but recognizes that illegal immigration harms both US citizens and non-citizens who are following the law and trying to come here legally.