Salvador Rizzo, Glenn Kessler, and Meg Kelly have published Your fact-checking cheat sheet for Trump’s immigration address:
President Trump will be speaking from the Oval Office tonight to make the case for $5.7 billion to start building a wall along the southern U.S. border — the crux of a funding impasse with Congress that has led to a partial government shutdown. Here at The Fact Checker, we already have a pretty good sense of the claims he will make — as the president and his aides have been using them for weeks.
Here’s a guide to 20 possible assertions the president will make tonight so that readers can follow along as he speaks. You could use these claims to create your own form of bingo. If you are tempted to create a drinking game, however, we recommend you water down the drinks.
Trump is a relentless liar, but the cheat sheet they’ve prepared will help viewers debunk some of his most egregious immigration-related mendacities, including false claims that
(1) the situation along our southern border is a national crisis,
(2) that the wall will be paid for by the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal,
(3) that Trump has already started building the wall,
(4) that the wall will be built by good old American steel companies that were practically out of business,
(5) that Trump never said the wall would be concrete,
(6) that a wall in Israel is 99.9 percent effective,
(7) that U.S. officials have blocked nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists from entering the country,
and 13 other distortions that may also get a mention tonight.