Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., on Thursday accused President Donald Trump of calling in the National Guard to patrol the borders of his and other states to boost his own poll numbers after Congress did not fund his call for a border wall.
"The president essentially is using the National Guard, creating this hysteria that there's somehow a national emergency, and using your taxpayer dollars to try to booster his low poll numbers, especially with his base," Gallego told MSNBC's "Andrea Mitchell Reports." "Fact is, the president lost. He was not able to get his border wall."
Congress did try, in a "bipartisan manner," to give Trump a "really good deal to have a border wall . . . but he and his advisers don't know how to take a good deal, so he failed," Gallego said. "Now they're lashing out to do anything to get a lifesaver and survive."
Mitchell pointed out Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, a Republican, has supported Trump's decision to deploy the National Guard to the border, as have other Republican governors from the southwest, but Gallego claimed Ducey cannot be trusted.
"I would say to my constituents that I've worked with the governor, I've been in the State House for four years," Gallego said. "I think he's not always true to his words. If you look at how often we are not funding our state troopers, who are actually very important when it comes to public safety, we could argue about that."
However, he said, any governor would like to take any help they can get, provided their own states do not have to pay for it.
"Right now we have no clue who's paying for this," Gallego said. "The defense budget? Coming out of the Department of Homeland Security? Who is going to be activated? How long is it going to take?"
As matters stand, he continued, "the fact that a sitting president could just on a whim order the National Guard to any parts of this country, [whether or not] there actually is a verified threat or emergency, should certainly concern us all."
Troops were sent to the border under Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, but when that happened, it was explained how long they would be there and how much it costs, Gallego said.
He also took offense at White House claims repairing parts of the old border wall constitute building a new wall.
"I think that they're trying to move us into a very Orwellian world claiming something old is new and something new is old," Gallego said. "We could give you some really good border security measures if you work with Congress in a bipartisan manner. But walls or fake walls, what the president has right now, is not going to do it. Not only is it not going to do it, even his own base does not believe the semantics they're playing with right now."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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