President Donald Trump dropped a whopper of a falsehood in a rant to reporters as he landed in Florida for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump strode to the cameras on the tarmac Friday afternoon to address reporters without taking questions. He launched into a tirade about the government shutdown he has struggled to blame on Democrats:
PRESIDENT DONALD: So the shutdown continues. The Republican Party is not going to pay a trillion and a half dollars to illegal immigrants coming into our country.
Coming in for a lot of reasons, coming from prisons, from jails, from all over the place, from Venezuela, many countries. We’re not going do that.
So the shut down continues. It’s a Democrat shutdown. It’s Schumer’s shutdown because his career has failed and it’s over.
But CNN’s Daniel Dale, among others, has debunked that $1.5 trillion claim while explaining where it came from:
Leaving aside the subjective but dubious claim that Democrats are seeking to destroy others’ health care – Democrats are proposing to reverse Trump-approved cuts to Medicaid and other health programs and extend the enhanced pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year – they are not proposing to spend $1.5 trillion on undocumented immigrants. Undocumented people are not eligible for either Obamacare subsidies or federal Medicaid insurance coverage (hospitals are required to provide people with emergency care regardless of immigration status or ability to pay).
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group, estimated that the spending proposal the Democrats released in September would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. But that figure is not about undocumented people in particular. And the White House itself has claimed that Democrats are proposing to spend about $193 billion – much less than Trump’s “$1.5 trillion” – on health care for “illegal immigrants and other non-citizens,” the emphasis ours. The White House published an itemized list that makes clear that even by its own contested calculations, the majority of even that smaller sum would be for these “other non-citizens” who are in the US legally.
