Trump Invokes Immigrant ‘Invasion’ Language In Veto Speech Hours After New Zealand Massacre

As previewed extensively here on Thursday in “Veto Corleone“, Donald Trump has issued the first veto of his presidency in the interest of usurping Congress’s power over the public purse and commandeering funds lawmakers refused to give him for his border wall.

Hilariously, Trump actually accused Congress of “voting against reality”, an effort to effectively turn the tables on everyone who has time and again pointed out that there is almost no evidence to support the president’s claims about there being an “emergency” on the southern border. Here’s a quick recap from the above-linked veto preview:

That lack of evidence partially explains why the administration was immediately  sued by the nonprofit watchdog group Public Citizen, by the Center for Biological Diversity in conjunction with the Defenders of Wildlife, the Animal Legal Defense Fund and by California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Virginia, and the People of Michigan.

Adding insult to injury, more than two dozen former GOP lawmakers and a veritable who’s who of high profile national security personnel implored Congress to block Trump’s declaration in sharply-worded open letters late last month.

The letter from the security officials notes that Trump’s characterization of the situation on the southern border is “rebutted not just by the public record, but by his agencies’ own official data, documents, and statements.”

“Under no plausible assessment of the evidence is there a national emergency today”, the officials continued.

But, in a page right out of the Steve Bannon playbook, Trump not only insisted that there is in fact an emergency, but explicitly accused Congress and his critics of themselves being out of touch with reality. Black is white. Up is down. Trump’s hair is real.

But perhaps the most disturbing thing about Trump’s comments (delivered at what amounted to a veto ceremony), is that he actually parroted the “invasion” line on a day when New Zealand suffered a horrific mass shooting perpetrated by a man who cited immigrant “invasions” as a motive. Here’s Trump:

Got that? Let’s just go over this one more time. Donald Trump, on Friday, overrode a bipartisan resolution aimed at blocking his national emergency order, and in the course of doing so, he said this:

We’re on track for a million illegal aliens to rush our borders. People hate the word ‘invasion’ but that’s what it is. It’s an invasion of drugs and criminals and people we have no idea who they are.

So there’s that. And here’s a passage from the 74-page manifesto penned by the New Zealand shooter and posted to social media prior to the massacre:

The final push was witnessing the state of French cities and towns. For many years I had been hearing and reading of the invasion of France by nonwhites, many of these rumors and stories I believed to be exaggerations, created to push a political narrative. But once I arrived in France, I found the stories not only to be true, but profoundly understated.

Here’s Trump’s half-hearted response when asked if white nationalism is a “rising threat”:

It is absolutely astonishing that Trump would roll out the “invasion” language just hours after a mass shooting targeting Muslim worshipers by a gunman who used the exact same language prior to murdering more than four dozen people.

Then again, I don’t know why I would use the word “astonishing” – after all, everyone knew it was coming…

Trump is about to tell us all how bad it is that someone would cite an immigrant "invasion" as an excuse for murder at the very same event where he'll veto a bipartisan congressional resolution aimed at stopping him from building a wall designed to stop a made up "invasion".

— Heisenberg Report (@heisenbergrpt) March 15, 2019

There’s nothing left to say here.