-Building a border wall has been President Trump's
central promise to voters
since the beginning of his 2016 campaign.
Three years later, the promised wall has not been built.
But he's still talking about it.
-I will build a great, great wall on our southern border.
We need 1,000 miles.
And we have all of the materials.
We can do that so beautifully.
And this is going to be a serious wall.
This is going to be a high wall.
We think we're gonna have close to 500 miles of wall.
It'll be over 400 miles.
We think we can get it close to 500 miles.
-The flow of videos and photos that the President tweets
of the wall's progress,
and what's actually going on at the border, are very different.
-For nearly three years, we've heard consistently
hundreds of times from President Trump,
"We're building the wall, we're building the wall,
we're building the wall."
The definition of what he considers the wall
has changed quite significantly.
-During the 2016 election, Trump pledged to build a wall
along the US-Mexico border
which is almost 2,000 miles long.
Then he said the wall would be 1,000 miles
and cover half of the border with natural barriers
taking care of the rest.
That estimate dropped to 500 miles by the 2020 election.
In reality, by September of 2019,
funding had only been approved
for roughly 260 miles of replacement barriers.
And as of September 19th, 2019,
approximately 66 miles of old fencing
has been replaced with a new barrier.
-The claim has evolved and shifted.
If you're trying to test it for truth,
you know, it doesn't really add up.
-Trump said he would build the wall out of concrete,
and then he switched to steel.
So far, the new barrier has been built with steel bollards,
which are hollow steel beams filled with concrete and rebar.
-It's not really a wall. It's a fence.
It's a very sturdy and imposing fence, but it's a fence.
And so, you know, the president keeps saying the same thing
as if he's fulfilled a campaign promise.
A lot of his supporters may find
that what he's building is acceptable to them,
but it's still not what he promised.
-But Trump's rhetoric on the wall has stayed the same,
especially on Twitter.
-His use of Twitter is extremely effective.
He is not only able to go over the news media
to be able to communicate directly to the country,
but he uses it very strategically.
I mean, he uses it to dominate the conversation,
he uses it to, in fact, set the conversation.
-For months, he's tweeted misrepresentations
of unaltered video,
changing the details around the video
to make it seem like it's happening now.
Trump posted this video
twice in the summer of 2019 with the caption,
"The Wall is going up very fast despite total
Obstruction by the Democrats in Congress, and elsewhere!"
The video has been viewed more than 5 million times.
In February of 2019, Trump tweeted out a video
he claimed showed the border wall
under construction right now.
But that's not what the video shows.
The US Army Corps of Engineers produced the video and confirmed
that it was, in fact, filmed in September of 2018,
and it shows progress on a border project
in Santa Teresa, New Mexico,
using funds appropriated in 2017.
In January of 2019,
Trump tweeted a photo of what he claimed
was a section of the new wall, quote, "Just completed."
But the photo was time stamped for three months earlier.
-In our database of Trump's false and misleading claims,
the "building the wall claim," it was the most repeated claim
out of all 12,000 that we had tallied.
He's just reinforcing this idea
that he's fulfilled this campaign promise.
-Trump uses the idea of the wall to mobilize his base,
often tweeting about it during major political moments,
like the 2018 midterm elections, the 2019 government shutdown,
and the peak of the Mueller investigation.
But it's not just the wall.
Trump has broadly misrepresented
the effectiveness of his immigration strategy.
He tweeted a Mexican government chart on US migration numbers
that appeared to be design to flatter him,
but his own government's data show nearly 1 million migrants
were arrested along the Mexico border in 2019 fiscal year.
That ended in September 30th, marking a 12-year high.
Along with posts saying misleading numbers and imagery,
Trump regularly throws out extravagant plans
that don't seem to have any basis in reality.
Trump reportedly wanted to build an alligator-filled moat
and arm the US forces with bayonets.
He also allegedly requested the wall be painted black
with spikes to intimidate migrants,
making it hot and harder to climb.
-It's extremely hot, the wall is --
You won't be able to touch it.
You can fry an egg on that wall.
-He claims he hired professional climbers to test it out.
-We have, I guess you could say, world-class mountain climbers.
We got climbers. We had 20 mountain climbers.
We gave them different prototypes of walls,
and this was the one that was hardest to climb.
-But no one can find these climbers.
It's a small, tight-knit world,
so you would figure that, you know, someone would know.
So, it seems like it's made up. -Trump is reinforcing
a favorable but inaccurate narrative.
He misrepresents the wall's progress
by constantly posting images of it,
harnessing his reach and power on Twitter.
-The wall is an important part of Trump's politics
and what he sold to the American people,
and so it's always gonna figure very prominently
in his public remarks or when he's tweeting.
-Trump's campaign promise to build the wall
will likely be a focal point of the 2020 election.
And if history is any indication,
he'll tweet about it.
If there are statements you heard politicians say
that don't quite make sense at rallies, state fairs,
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Send us a note or a tweet with what they said
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