As US shutdown heads toward its fourth week
Trump delivers fascistic White House rant to demand border wall
By
Barry Grey
9 January 2019
The putrefaction of American democracy and the turn by the US ruling elite toward dictatorship were on full display Tuesday night as President Donald Trump delivered a fascistic anti-immigrant rant, demanding funding for his US-Mexico border wall as the precondition for ending the partial government shutdown now in its 19th day.
The nine-minute prime time address, broadcast live by all of the broadcast and cable news networks, was a rehash of the administration’s lies about a nonexistent “national security crisis” on the southwestern border. It featured Trump’s standard depiction of immigrant workers and their families seeking refuge from poverty and repression—the result of a century of US imperialist intervention and exploitation throughout Latin America—as murderers, rapists and drug pushers.
In a transparent appeal to fascistic elements in his base, Trump conjured up an image of hordes of savages pouring across the border determined to spill the blood of innocent Americans. After citing several examples of Americans allegedly killed or raped by criminal “aliens,” he asked, “How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”
In the run-up to the speech, claims made by Trump officials, including Vice President Mike Pence and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, that thousands of terrorists have been apprehended attempting to illegally enter the US from Mexico were exposed as pure fabrications. Widely cited was the State Department’s summary of global terrorism threats published in September, which concluded that there was “no credible evidence indicating that international…