In Oval Office Address, Trump Tries Reheating Old Immigration Gripes From the Campaign and Calling It a Crisis

The expectation coming into President Trump’s primetime address Tuesday night was that Trump would use the nationally televised moment to try to make a case that building a wall was some sort of an emergency, something urgent, something that required the nation’s attention not just anytime—but right now. Despite his penchant for fiery unsubstantiated rhetoric to make his point, from the Oval Office Trump flatly offered up little more than reheated immigration talking points that slowly got around to the idea that a wall would be a good idea. The lines haven’t really changed since the campaign, which was now two-plus years ago, and for a president who is trying to stoke a sense of an emergency offering up nothing new from last week, or last month, or even last year, doesn’t provide much of a rationale for dropping everything to fix a thing that hasn’t changed all that much. The wall, whatever it might look like, came off as a priority for a frustrated president, not an emergency.

from Stories from Slate http://bit.ly/2LX0Jjf