David Pratt: Donald Trump ups the ante over border wall as federal shutdown continues

Despite considerable anticipation and build up to Mr Trump’s live televised address from the Oval Office on Tuesday night, the first of his Administration, in the end it was something of a damp squib. 

Or, as one political observer noted, it was something of a “radical experiment in conventionality”, compared to Mr Trump’s usual approach by ‘winging it’. 

The president did his best to lay out his case for why a shutdown of the US government must continue until Democrats agree to $5.7 billion (£4.47bn) in funding to build the border wall with Mexico. In the end though it was all a bit of a dud. 

There was no declaration of a national emergency in an effort to bypass opposition from congressional Democrats, which he’d been openly advocating in the previous few days. 

Likewise Mr Trump’s speech was short on any real and meaningful arguments in making the case for his much vaunted border wall. 

And as for any new proposals to end the partial US government shutdown, these too were in short supply.

What Mr Trump did do, of course, was more of what he does best by once again bending the truth beyond all recognition and laying the blame for the crisis elsewhere.

“My fellow Americans, there is a growing security and humanitarian crisis at our southern border,” insisted Mr Trump.

“How much more American blood must be shed before Congress does its job?

"Imagine if it was your child, or husband, or wife whose life was so cruelly shattered,” the president intoned. 

The reality of course is altogether different, as there is no national security crisis at the southern border.

As the federal shutdown has deepened, Mr Trump has done all he can to whip up fear by trying to scare Americans into believing terrorists are pouring into the US from Mexico. 

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, last Sunday went as far as to claim that “nearly 4,000 known or suspected terrorists come into our country illegally”, adding that the “most vulnerable point of entry is at our southern border.”

This despite former national security and counterterrorism experts reiterating that there had never been a case of a known terrorist sneaking into the US through open areas of the southwest border.

“There is no wave of terrorist operatives waiting to cross overland into the United States,” Nicholas J. Rasmussen, the former director of the National Counterterrorism Centre, said on Tuesday just as Mr Trump was about to deliver his address. “It simply isn’t true.”

One US intelligence official was even more forthright in his assessment of the claims.

“No one is saying this is a crisis except them. They’re playing the public for suckers,” he said speaking to CNN.

If Mr Trump’s art of persuasion appears to have hit the buffers on Tuesday night over his scaremongering about the border, so too does he seem to have learnt a painful lesson on political deal making. 

“Leverage: don’t make deals without it.” Those words appeared under Mr Trump’s byline on page 55 of the 1987 best seller, The Art of the Deal.

But ever since then Mr Trump it would seem has struggled to apply such a working maxim to his presidency and the current crisis is yet another example.

As political writer David Frum of The Atlantic magazine put it succinctly on Tuesday: “In this budget shutdown, Trump discarded his leverage from the very start, by declaring for the cameras that the budget shutdown was his decision, his responsibility.

“When the shutdown began to hurt, Trump and his surrogates hastily tried to transfer the onus - but it was too late. Everybody knew that it was Trump’s doing, and that it was done for reasons rejected by large majorities of Americans,” observed Mr Frum.

It is of course a classic Trump strategy to throw blame elsewhere, but this time the Democrats are having none of it. 

While careful not to be seen by the American public as weak on border control security, the Democrats They have studiously avoided being drawn into the debate, preferring instead to cannily focus public attention on the painful costs of the partial government shutdown.

Newly in control of the House, for Democrats the shutdown battle has proved a unifying factor, galvanising a near-universal belief in their ranks that Congress should act as a check on the power of a president who has shown little regard for the law and has used his office to sow fear and misinformation on issues like immigration.

In their rebuttal to Mr Trump’s address on Tuesday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said the president had chosen fear but that they wanted to start with the facts. 

They pointed out to the fact that, far from ignoring the issue of border security, on the first day of Congress House Democrats passed Senate Republican legislation that provides $1.3bn for that very purpose. 

They stressed again, too, the fact the president had chosen to hold hostage critical services for the health, safety and well-being of the American people and withhold the paycheques of 800,000 innocent workers, all because of his “obsession with forcing American taxpayers to waste billions of dollars on an expensive and ineffective wall”.

If there was one overarching tone in the Democrats’ response on Tuesday it was one of calm.  Both Ms Pelosi and Mr Schumer seemed determined to show they and not Mr Trump offer responsible government.

In all, Tuesday’s address was not the best of performances from the president. The uncharacteristically slow and deliberate articulation of Mr Trump’s heavily scripted speech led American comic Seth MacFarlane to wryly Tweet that the 9-something-minute address “had the cadence of a Wheel of Fortune contestant solving the puzzle”.

No doubt the President is aware of how poorly his address went down even if he is never one to admit it. For the moment the ongoing closure of a quarter of US federal agencies is the second longest in history. 

With Mr Trump’s next big set piece event being a journey to the Mexico border today, we will most likely see a very different performance. He may even be tempted to follow through on his threat to declare a national emergency.