On Saturday, and then again on Thursday, the main point President Trump drew our attention to on his chart is the red arrow at the bottom. He proudly proclaimed what the label says - that it points to the lowest level of illegal immigration and that it was when he left office.
But look closely. While the red arrow does point out the lowest rate of illegal immigration, it incorrectly labels it as the day he left office. The arrow is pointing to March 2020. President Trump left office peacefully in January 2021.
What happened in March 2020? The COVID scare reached hysterical levels and the subsequent lockdowns began. How did President Trump respond to this unprecedented crisis? He used the executive authority he had as President and shut the border down. To protect Americans.
The current administration has the same authority to shut the border down now. They claim they do not, but that is simply a result of weak and ineffectual leadership. The number of American fentanyl deaths so far alone easily surpasses the number of American COVID deaths at the time when President Trump effectively closed the border with Title 42 due to the perceived health crisis. At the very least, the current administration could attempt to work with Congress to pass any law needed to give clear authority to close the border.
But they refuse. They either do not see this as an obvious crisis endangering Americans, or they do, and do not care to stop it. By refusing to exercise that authority and close the border, they demonstrate that any pandering they do on this issue is the standard hot political garbage they are all too well versed in due to decades of existence within the swamp. In fact, the most dramatic action in this chart is when President Trump did leave office in January 2021. At that time the new administration showed what they thought about the border and created their own high wall - of illegal immigrants.
The other side doesn't even deny that President Trump will do something dramatic once again. Instead, they claim that stopping this tsunami of illegal immigration would be cruel to illegal immigrants. It is an America last policy. They do not empathize with fellow Americans nor acknowledge the damage this inflicts upon them. Rather, they are overly concerned with not offending these non-Americans with a label of 'illegal'.
President Trump will fix this problem and the chart bears that out. The period of the first Trump Presidency is impossible to miss. It starts in January 2017 with a dramatic drop in illegal immigration. It then displays a ramp up in the total rate driven by families seeking better lives as the economy took off and made America extremely attractive. But this chart tracks illegal immigrants, and while the ramp formed an eventual spike in 2019, the chart shows that the issue was effectively addressed, bringing the rate down to nearly what it was at the start of the Trump Presidency. Notably, that decrease was accomplished with other policies before the closing of the border in the health crisis.
President Trump, intentionally in my opinion, showed this 'beautiful' chart that contains an obvious error. Twice. And each time he highlighted this error and used it to prop himself up. He laid a masterful trap to bait his detractors into pointing this out so they could call him a liar. But if they took the bait, they would open the door to seeing the rest of the chart that clearly demonstrates that he solved this problem before and will do it again. If the events of Saturday did not happen and change everything, I am sure the bait would have been taken.
This chart truly is beautiful, and President Trump is a genius.
Trump left the office of the President and became Comander in Chief.