President Donald Trump is set to give his first primetime Oval Office speech tonight, and while we don’t know exactly what he plans to say, we do know that it will be a plea to build is dumb wall, or barrier, or steel slats, or whatever backtrack-y word he’s using this week. It’s also been reported that the speech is being authored by none other than the administration’s top white nationalist, Stephen Miller, which means we should probably expect it to be full of racist innuendo.
But according to the Wall Street Journal, the rest of Trump’s White House staff has an innovative new strategy they’re trying out tonight: Attempting to make sure Trump doesn’t lie through his teeth.
Per the Journal:
In preparation for Tuesday’s speech inside the West Wing, White House officials were underscoring the importance of internally fact-checking any numbers and statistics. “It’s really important we get this right,” one senior White House official said.
This focus on not fucking up comes after a series of high-profile, well, fuck ups from top administration officials when it comes to making the case for the wall: White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed last week that 4,000 suspected terrorists were detained entering the U.S. last year, which was promptly disproven and later called a “misstatement” by White House advisor Kellyanne Conway.
Meanwhile, the president’s claim that some past presidents have told him they support the wall—which all four living former presidents have denied—reduced Vice President Mike Pence to a quivering imbecile when he was confronted with this obvious piece of bullshit by NBC’s Hallie Jackson.
Still, the fact that the White House seems to recognize that they actually have to, y’know, get their information correct before the president gets on national TV and runs his mouth is nothing if not a tacit admission that getting things right is out of the ordinary for them. And admitting fault is the first step to recovery, right?