Trump Brags About His New Wall; "Washington Examiner:" Trump Has Not Built A Single Mile Of New Border Fence After 30 Months In Office
LEMON: President Trump thinks he should be getting credit for replacing old fencing on our southern border. Here's what he tweeted this evening. He said "When he ripped down and totally replaced a badly broken and dilapidated barrier on the southern border, something which cannot be, do the job, the fake news media gives us zero credit for building a new wall. We have replaced many miles of old barrier with powerful new walls." OK. Let's dig into the facts with Daniel Dale. So, Daniel, building new wall when you're replacing old fencing. What is actually happening on the ground? This tweet is -- this tweet is flat out false.</s>DANIEL DALE, CNN REPORTER: Well, what is happening is that as the tweet sort of implicitly acknowledges, the president has not built entirely new miles of wall. So, no additional parts of the border have been covered by wall or even fencing during his presidency. What has happened is about 50 miles where there was already fencing or other kinds of barriers have had their fencing upgraded. And for most of the Trump's presidency, he is simply asserted that that is his wall, like we're building a wall, it's going up very fast. And people like me, fact checkers, have said, no, you're just replacing fencing. Now, he starts to make an explicit argument that that replacement fencing should be counted by people like you and I as his wall.</s>LEMON: So, he's saying that he deserves credit for steel bollard fencing yet -- I mean, he promised -- that's not what he promised during the campaign. Watch this.</s>DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We're going to build a wall and it's going to be impenetrable. It will be a real wall. It's not going to be a little wall. It's going to be a big, beautiful wall.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What are the walls going to be made out of?</s>TRUMP: I'll tell you what it's going to be made up. It's going to be made of hardened concrete. Concrete plank, precast, boom, bing, done, keep going. Wall are easy. Brick as concrete, going very high.</s>LEMON: So is he -- I mean, it's a flagrant moving of the goalpost or moving of the -- I don't know, fence post?</s>DALE: It is a moving of some kind of post, Don. I mean, some of this is subjective like, you know, you can argue the wall, you know, doesn't have to be concrete to be a wall. You can have a hole or two in it and still be a wall. But Trump certainly didn't campaign on replacing fencing like his supporters at rallies were not chanting replace that fence. And so, you know, this attempt to define wall as replacement fencing is certainly a shifting of the definitions here.</s>LEMON: You point out that this tweet seems like it could be in response to a piece from the Washington Examiner, "Trump has not built a single mile of new border fence after 30 months in office." And here is what they write, OK? This is the Washington Examiner which you -- I'm sure know is pretty friendly to the president. "While the funding was meant both to replace outdated walls and to place barriers where there previously had been none, the government has only completed the replacement projects. The projects to secure areas with no fence are still in the works." So, is there any plan to actually build new portions of the wall in the works right now?</s>DALE: So there are some plans in the works. For example, the Customs and Border Protection says that they are close to beginning construction on a 13-mile stretch in Texas, in the RGV Valley. But that project faces legal challenges and the preconstruction activities portion of this construction project seems to be dragging on. So in short, yes, there are plans, but we don't know when it will actually happen.</s>LEMON: So just the facts, no new wall has been built?</s>DALE: No new wall, no.</s>LEMON: Daniel Dale. Thank you, sir.</s>DALE: Thank you.</s>LEMON: The president seems to be all in on his reelection strategy of dividing Americans, but what should Democrats do in 2020? That's the question for David Swerdlick, Joe Trippi, next.