President Trump sure must be worried about something he said to someone at some point:

A beefed-up White House legal team is gearing up to prevent President Trump’s confidential discussions with top advisers from being disclosed to House Democratic investigators….The strategy to strongly assert the president’s executive privilege on both fronts is being developed under newly arrived White House Counsel Pat Cipollone, who has hired 17 lawyers in recent weeks to help in the effort.

….Of particular concern to Democrats: whether the White House will seek to use executive privilege to keep private any portions of Mueller’s report that addresses alleged obstruction of justice by the president….If the Justice Department agrees with the White House counsel that the report or portions of it should be withheld from the public, the House could try to subpoena the document….The legal showdown could be one of the most significant debates over presidential executive privilege since President Richard Nixon sought to block the release of his White House tapes in the Watergate investigation.

The White House has hired 17 lawyers for this? That’s a helluva lot of lawyers. They must be pretty sure there’s some seriously damning stuff coming out in Mueller’s report.

I guess yesterday’s bird challenge was too easy. Not only did Steve get it right, but so did Crissa, Peter Murphy, and jp1954. As you can see from the picture below, it is indeed a turkey vulture.

This was an incredibly lucky shot. It was part of a short burst just as the bird flew over me, and I barely had time to aim the camera. I just pointed it in the right direction and pushed the shutter button. By good chance, one of the shots was well lit and nicely centered, which allowed the autofocus to produce a tack sharp image. It was a good start to the year.

Armando Gallo/ZUMA

You may recall that comedian Aziz Ansari fell afoul of the #MeToo movement a year ago when a woman wrote that Ansari had pressured her for sex on a date a few months earlier. She sent him a text message about it the morning after the date and he apologized. “Clearly, I misread things in the moment and I’m truly sorry.” Ansari says the sex was entirely consensual.

He got pretty beat up regardless, and in the New Yorker last year Eren Orbey wrote about how the incident had affected Ansari’s comedy:

In his latest set, Ansari suggests that collective anger has overcorrected; now, rather than hold power to account, it targets the slightest and least consequential controversies. “Why is everyone weighing in on this shit?” Ansari asked of the Twitter users who flocked to debate whether an American teen-ager’s choice of prom dress constituted so-called cultural appropriation. “Everyone weighs in on everything. They don’t know anything. People don’t wanna just say, ‘I don’t know.’ ”…Without ever mentioning the #MeToo movement—or his own experience as one of its most disputed casualties—Ansari decries the destructive performativity of Internet activism and the fickle, ever-changing standards of political correctness.

….In his public statement in January, Ansari made a point of affirming the #MeToo movement as “necessary and long overdue.” One might have hoped that, nearly a year later, he could find a way to reckon with one of the movement’s messiest lessons: that even men who wish to serve as allies of women can, intentionally or not, hurt them in private. Perhaps doing so might help Ansari to regain the trust of the women who feel that he has lost theirs. Instead, like other men who have reëmerged in recent months, he seems to have channelled his experience into a diffuse bitterness.

Anna North comments further today, writing about both Louis C.K. and Ansari:

Whatever the case, the trajectories of C.K. and Ansari are doubly disappointing — first, because men whose work had a feminist bent were accused of hurting women, and second, because they let those accusations destroy the nuanced social awareness their earlier work displayed….That’s sad for all of us. We don’t get to see the comedy these men could have created if they’d wanted to face, rather than flee from, our current moment in history.

….Ever since the #MeToo movement gained mainstream attention in 2017, there’s been a lot of talk about what accused men can do to redeem themselves. Now, more than a year in, it’s certainly possible to imagine some of the accused truly reckoning with their pasts — Dan Harmon’s apology for sexually harassing a writer on his show offers a view of what that might look like. But it’s hard to hold out much hope for such a reckoning on a large scale when two men who seemed like they, of all people, might be able to look deeply at their own behavior have instead chosen to pander to those who would excuse them.

I think it’s a mistake to lump Louis C.K. and Ansari together here. C.K.’s behavior was clearly sexual abuse from a man with power over women and it happened multiple times. What’s more, he never truly reckoned with it in any sort of public way. He deserved to be shunned, and questions about his “comeback” are perfectly well deserved.

But Ansari’s case is entirely different, and produces a different lesson. What he did was obviously in a gray area; it happened once; he apologized at the time; and he apologized again when it became public. Nonetheless, he endured an epic beatdown on social media, much of it driven not so much by what he did, but by disappointment that it ruined the fantasy image his fans had built up of him.

And now we’re disappointed that Ansari (a) feels sort of bitter about this, and (b) has a different view of social media mobs. But maybe he has a point? His offense was obviously minor and he clearly apologized for it. And yet, the mob came for him anyway, dumping him in the same bin as a serial sexual abuser like C.K. What conclusion should he have drawn from that?

Well, he’s human, and social media mobs are no fun. And that leads us to something that progressives don’t always acknowledge: when someone apologizes and comes over to your side—or was on your side all along—accept the apology and welcome them aboard. Don’t expect sackcloth and ashes for months on end. Max Boot recently wrote a book repudiating his entire past as a conservative and has since become an effective spokesman against Trump and for liberal causes, but on social media he’s harassed endlessly as a murderous neocon because he supported the Iraq War. What does this accomplish except to eventually convince him that trying to engage with progressives was never worth it in the first place? Ditto for Ansari. He probably figures—reasonably enough—that if social media mobs do what they did to him, maybe social media mobs aren’t such a great thing after all.

I think progressives need to do a better job of understanding human nature. If someone gets attacked relentlessly, you can’t expect them to simply absorb it all with perfect humility. Most of us aren’t saints. Before long we get resentful, and that resentment makes us question the whole progressive project. And then we’ve lost another ally.

Social media is a headless monster, and progressive leaders are way too unwilling to rein it in. They could, by sometimes suggesting that the mob stand down because the offense in question isn’t that big a deal. But most of them won’t, because they know that they’ll pay a price for taking the non-woke side of anything, regardless of reason. Better to just go along and keep their street cred safe.

That’s not really leadership, though. We could use more of the real thing.

As a quick followup to the previous post about the lies in President Trump’s immigration speech, it’s worth noting that one of them may actually backfire on him. Going into the speech, I was willing to acknowledge his point about drug smuggling, which really has increased recently and really is a problem. But I didn’t realize that nearly all drug smuggling is done via legal ports of entry (hidden in spare tires, placed in containers on legitimate commercial trucks, etc.). I’ve now been told this about a dozen times, and I realize that drug smuggling would be only marginally affected by more border fencing.

So not only was Trump’s speech probably ineffective in general, it might have wrecked one of the points that even wall skeptics like me were willing to give him. Nice work.

Yesterday I suggested that Donald Trump wouldn’t lie “very much” in his immigration speech, and millions of you scoffed at me:

Looking forward to tomorrow’s ‘welp, I was wrong’ tweet.

— happy Gritty-nineteen! (@PMMDJ) January 8, 2019

I’ll take the over.

— Ulysses Castillo (@Uman2631) January 8, 2019

Define much.

— William E. Umfleet (@WmEUmfleet) January 8, 2019

William has the key observation here: “Define much.” This gives me a measure of wiggle room, after all. So let’s tally the lies:

1. “At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.”
   This is just flat wrong. Democrats never asked for any particular kind of wall, and anyway, a steel bollard fence is what we’re using right now for the hundreds of miles of border barriers already constructed. It’s what the security professionals have wanted from the very start.
2. “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.”
   Illegal drugs are almost all smuggled in through legal ports of entry, not hauled across the desert. Building a wall would be unlikely to have any substantial affect on drug smuggling.
3. “America’s heart broke the day after Christmas, when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien who just came across the border….Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders. In California…In Georgia…In Maryland….I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible.”
   This is trickier. Trump’s examples are real crimes, but the clear implication of all this is that unauthorized immigrants commit violent crimes on a grand scale. A pretty good recent study suggests this is untrue:

   

   As the chart shows, violent crime decreased in areas that experienced more illegal immigration, and there are plenty of other studies that show similar results. In contrast, there are very few that provide any evidence of the opposite. In general, areas with large proportions of undocumented immigrants tend to be fairly peaceful, filled with people who just want jobs and are eager to avoid doing anything that might bring them to the attention of the police and get them deported. More here.

4. “The wall will also be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico.”
   This falls into Wolfgang Pauli’s famous category of being so ridiculous that “it’s not even wrong.” It’s like saying the wall will be funded indirectly from the taxes paid by the workers who build the wall. That’s not how it works.
5. “Last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the United States, a dramatic increase. These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs.”
   According to Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star, child trafficking across the border is pretty rare, and he seems to be right. Even the official statistics are fairly modest, and they’re almost certainly overstated anyway. Many of the children taken away from the adults who accompany them turn out to be related after all, or are being looked after by a friend. Actual cases of child trafficking seem to be very uncommon.
6. “There is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border.”
   There might be a growing humanitarian crisis at the border, but it’s mostly of Trump’s own making. As for a security crisis, that’s just flatly untrue. The number of illegal crossers apprehended by the Border Patrol is a small fraction of what it used to be, and has been declining for the past two decades:

   

   There’s just no way to spin this into a security crisis, especially since 700 miles of fencing has been built since 2000; the Border Patrol’s budget has expanded considerably; and the number of agents patrolling the border has doubled—with another 5,000 on tap for future expansion.

7. “It strains public resources and drives down jobs and wages. Among those hardest hit are African Americans and Hispanic Americans.”
   This is highly questionable, and the bulk of the evidence suggests that illegal immigration is a net wash in terms of wages. However, there is some evidence that it affects the wages of the lowest income workers and of workers who don’t speak English well. So….
8. “Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis, and they have refused to provide our brave border agents with the tools they desperately need to protect our families and our nation. The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only: because Democrats will not fund border security.”
   This is untrue. Democrats have acknowledged everything except the need for a wall. The one and only reason for the government shutdown is Donald Trump’s obsession with spending billions of dollars on a wall that would have little to no effect on border security.

So what’s the bottom line? I’ll give Trump half credit for #3 (crime) and #7 (wages), since the evidence on both isn’t 100 percent clear. So that gives us a score of six lies and two half-lies in the space of eight minutes. Even grading on a curve, that’s a lot of lies.

So I was wrong and the Twitter mob was right. Even with every possible incentive to be as truthful as possible in front of a national audience—not to mention an army of fact checkers just waiting for every misstep—Trump told a lie about once a minute. Apparently the man just can’t help himself.

Rob Pinney/London News Pictures via ZUMA

While we engage in a ridiculous government shutdown that serves no purpose beyond political dick measuring, our friends in Britain are desperately trying to show that they can run a country just as badly as we can. If I understand things so far:

• Theresa May has negotiated a Brexit deal with the EU. Nobody likes it much, but it’s the only thing on the table.
• Many people are expecting Parliament to vote down the deal, leading to the chaos of a no-deal Brexit.
• However, last night Parliament voted for an amendment that would curb the government’s taxing power in the event of no-deal.
• This is apparently meant as a spur to vote for a Brexit plan…but, I don’t know what the real deal is here. It’s kind of dumb, since Parliament can restore the taxing power anytime it wants.
• Anyway, today Parliament also voted to require May to present an alternative Plan B within three days if her current plan gets voted down.
• This Plan B, of course, would not have been agreed to by the EU, so what’s the purpose here? I suppose it’s to give Parliament a chance to pull out of Brexit completely at the last minute?

There’s no guarantee that I have this right. It’s an unholy mess. Like the US, the whole thing seems to be driven by a need to assuage a tiny conservative minority or about 20 or 30 MPs, very similar in size to the Freedom Caucus that appears to drive just about everything in the Republican Party. It’s kind of weird how similar the political dynamics are in the US and Britain these days.

I guess I’ll liveblog the speech tonight. It’s only supposed to be eight minutes long, after all. So let’s give it a go. As usual, read from the bottom up.

My reaction: both sides were pretty ineffective. Trump’s speech was disjointed, and it was poorly delivered. He seemed nervous the whole time, and lied just enough to keep the fact checkers in business but not enough to make any interesting new points. That’s a dumb compromise from whoever wrote the speech. Also, eight minutes is just not enough time to give a decent address. It forces too much shortening of points that need a little more explanation for viewers who haven’t followed this debate in detail. Even I had to concentrate hard to pick up all of Trump’s points.

The response from Schumer and Pelosi was mostly boilerplate. Nothing badly wrong with it, but nothing very persuasive either. I would guess that almost no minds were changed tonight.

The CNN folks are now getting really animated. The more they think about it, the less they like Trump’s speech. Who doesn’t have a good heart? What’s the deal with the claims about a steel bollard fence, which is what we have right now? It’s just untrue that Dems are responsible for the shutdown. Jim Acosta says the speech should have come with a surgeon general’s warning that it was hazardous to the truth. Democrats never asked for a steel fence. Etc.

A full transcript of Trump’s speech, along with some fact checking, is here.

And now for the Democratic response. Chuck Schumer is much taller than Nancy Pelosi, and he’s staring at the camera sort of creepily as Pelosi speaks and he has nothing to do. Pelosi says Trump is manufacturing a crisis. We can solve all our border problems without a wall.

Schumer says the shutdown is Trump’s fault. “We don’t govern by temper tantrums.” Pelosi is pursing her lips. I guess it’s tough to stand silently while the other person is talking. Schumer now suggests we reopen the government and then keep on talking about the border. Trump is just “stoking fear.” We can protect our borders without an “ineffective, expensive wall.” Mr. President, “End. this. shutdown. now.” And that’s that.

Fact check from John King: The wall won’t do much about drugs, which come in from legal points of entry. NAFTA will not pay for the wall. People who are in the country illegally commit fewer crimes than natives.

Fact check from Daniel Dale: There’s not much child trafficking across the border. Not true that Democrats wanted a steel wall.

9:11 – “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.” And that’s a wrap. No declaration of a national emergency.

9:09 – Unsurprisngly, very heavy on crimes by people in the country illegally and how it affects the families of the victims. “I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls.”

9:08 – “Wealthy politicians” build walls around their homes. Why? “They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside.” That sounds like some potted wisdom from Kung Fu, which by coincidence I was watching on Amazon just a few minutes ago. I wonder who was responsible for this little nugget?

9:07 – Democrats are responsible for the shutdown because they don’t care about national security.

9:06 – The wall will be paid for “indirectly” by the new NAFTA agreement. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

9:05 – “At the request of Democrats” the wall will be a steel barrier instead of a concrete wall. That’s just idiotically untrue.

9:03 – Wow. A ton of numbers about crimes by undocumented immigrants. I have no idea if they’re correct. [Later: the post-speech Washington Post fact check didn’t flag anything, so I guess the numbers are accurate.]

9:02 – Blacks and Hispanics are the hardest hit by undocumented workers taking away their jobs. Vast quantities of illegal drugs flow in across the border.

9:01 – Whoops. Suddenly we’re in the Oval Office. Trump starts out by saying border agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter the country every day. That’s true, barely, I suppose.

9:00 – According the CNN, we are moments away. But they don’t seem to be in any special hurry to switch to the Oval Office.

Today’s picture is the first I’ve taken in 2019 and it’s dedicated to our resident avian expert. This is a challenge for Steve: can you identify this bird solely by its silhouette, like World War II plane spotters? Answer tomorrow!

The Wall Street Journal earns today’s award for the most unintentionally accurate and amusing headline:

As it happens, all McGurn says in his piece is that Trump has a bigger stake in winning the border wall fight than Nancy Pelosi does. But you know, it might be true that Trump literally can’t afford to leave the Oval Office anytime soon.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

Here’s a plucky prediction: President Trump’s primetime address about border security tonight will be relatively factual. Ever since he announced it, news about the speech has been dominated by complaints that the TV networks are willingly handing over time for Trump to broadcast his usual litany of lies about illegal immigration, and that’s going to push his speechwriters to take extra care not to include any provable deception. As for Trump himself, he’s savvy enough about TV—and uncomfortable enough with giving an Oval Office speech with no audience—that he’ll probably read the words on the teleprompter straight.

But what words? Here is Mickey Kaus’s advice:

If I were Trump I’d emphasize need to stop people from dying in the desert & threat of drugs & crime & threat to livable wages before emphasizing terrorism. Many non-GOP voters probably allergic to arguments about latter. Goal is to reach unconverted, no? https://t.co/nulME9BBeI

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) January 8, 2019

Kaus may have lost his mind over illegal immigration, but that means his advice is 100 percent sincere. What’s more, he’s a smart guy who’s pretty grounded in what’s likely to work and what isn’t.

Plus, I happen to agree with him.¹ Especially after the NBC News story exposing all the administration lies about terrorists crossing the border, Trump would be well advised to avoid talking about it at all. Conversely, he can truthfully talk about things like drug smuggling, MS-13, court backups, murders committed by people in the country illegally, and the caravan of asylum seekers who are currently crowding the Mexican border. He can easily avoid using any statistics—which are boring for most people anyway—except in a few cases where he really does have some dramatic numbers to choose from. He doesn’t need to lie to give a strong speech, and I think he’ll try to avoid it tonight even though he normally lies just for the hell of it.

And needless to say, he should simply say nothing about the number of undocumented workers coming across the border, which has been declining for years. Even mentioning it accomplishes nothing except to give the fact checkers an excuse to display this famous chart from Pew Research:

The details of what Trump says will depend on whether he decides to declare a state of emergency over the border. If he does, he should stick solely to security-related issues—with a minute or so left over to blame Democrats for compelling him into this last resort by acting like stone partisan obstructionists who don’t care about national security. If he doesn’t declare a state of emergency, then expanding the speech to include a few beats about humanitarian issues might be helpful to him.

We’ll see. Trump is Trump, and his advisors might not be able to prevent him from repeating some of his favorite lies. But I’ll bet he’s going to be more careful than usual tonight.

POSTSCRIPT: And the government shutdown? He probably needs to mention it, but my guess is that Trump is better off not reminding people that it’s even happening. It’s a useful talking point to beat up Democrats over, but a sentence or two is probably plenty.

¹I don’t mean that I agree with him about the wall—or much of anything else related to illegal immigration. I just agree that if I were on the other side, I’d consider this pretty sound advice.