our sacred duty to the american citizens we serve. when i took the oath of office, i swore to protect our country, and that is what i will always do so help me god. thank you and good night. all right. there you have it. there s president donald trump, first address to the nation there in the oval office. went about 9 minutes or so. it s time to check the facts. see if he was compelling and was what he said correct? we ll have a response from the democratic leaders coming up, but right now let s bring in john king and we have one of the best fact checkers out there. first to you, did he get it done? he created a sense of crisis and urgency. along the way. he also created a lot of business for the fact check machines. he says a wall will stop the heroin, the other opioids. most come in from legal points
this one ininto one big reveal. if you want to put it in reality tv terms. he s going to talk about this in terms of being a national security and humanitarian crisis to see if they can entice them to meet him halfway at the negotiating table. but what we re going to hear is that this is a crisis they feel he created himself. an emergency he created himself and that s more of a political emergency because he s not been able to get this wall he wants on the southern border up until this point and he manufactured this crisis in order to try to get the wall. but at this point, it s unclear whether the president can really sell the country on this tonight. these are prepared remarks. 7 to 8 minutes. maybe longer. here live from the oval office, president donald trump. my fellow americans, tonight i m speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border. every day, customs and border patrol agents encounter
wall last and talking about this being a crisis of the heart and the soul, seemingly morphing his wall idea into what is already there. it s an evolution. i don t know how durable that evolution is as we have seen throughout this process. the president s advisers, even the vice president will say something only to be undercut by the president later. this was the goal of this speech, was to project more heart into it and aids had told most of us that throughout the day. he was going to try to put more of a humanitarian face on this. that s the word the democrats are using. there is a crisis at the border. they just don t agree on what the crisis is. what i was struck by watching this speech, the president was not that into doing this speech. a lot of his advisers were and a lot of his friends on capitol hill thought he should do this. there s a reason he hasn t done an address like this in the course of the last two years and that s because he hasn t wanted to and you saw tonight why
there s bad people coming across. they re doing bad things and we have to stop them. so even though gloria is right, there was an expansion here and that might be more difficult for democrats to deal with saying no to those things, but did that really become the new narrative? no, because i think donald trump is stuck in the same narrative of these folks coming across the border, drugs coming across the border, a crisis. we obviously fact checked that. he did have the economic argument about african americans which we haven t heard him say that much before. but if you look at donald trump s twitter feed, if you paid attention to anything he has said over the last two weeks, even, it s all here, there s no real new material and it s always we went into this speech knowing that there would be no new material and they felt like the setting was sort of grandeur of the office would change it. but the problem is that kanye west has been in that office. it just didn t work for him. did he
critical to border security. it s also what professionals at the border want and need. this is just common sense. the border wall would very quickly pay for itself. the cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year. vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from congress. the wall will also be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we have made with mexico. senator chuck schumer who you will be hearing from later tonight has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past along with other democrats. they changed their mind only after i was elected president. democrats in congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis and they have refused to