Donald Trump Makes Up Stupid Thing

Evolution of a Pinocchio-On-Fire lie.

Look, kids, we know "Donald Trump lies" isn't exactly news. But at Saturday a rally in Topeka, Kansas, Trump offered a whopper that almost defies explanation. Right after lying that his administration would protect people with preexisting conditions (nope -- the administration agrees with a Texas lawsuit that could end such protections), Trump decided to get the crowd riled up about a terrible evil Democratic bill that  literally does not exist.  

Here, watch the creepy ol' liar lie (we've cued the vid to 35: 29 so you won't have to watch the whole mess):

Every single Democrat in the US Senate has signed up for the open borders -- and it's a bill. And it's called "The Open Borders Bill." What's going on? And it's written by -- guess who -- Dianne Feinstein.

As numerous sources point out, there's no such thing. Vox's immigration reporter, Dara Lind, had the best take on the Twitters:

I can’t fact-check this. I can’t. Because it neither exists nor even bears any colorable relationship to anything t… https: //t.co/NYwVJ0i3li

— Dara Lind (@Dara Lind) 1538873122.0 

That turns out to be not entirely the case either, as Lind later noted-- turns out that Trump was largely repeating dumb shit from the wingnuttosphere. He can't even come up with wholly original lies, although we'll give him this much: "The Open Borders Bill" is all his. Sounds exactly like the a name you'd expect from the guy who thought "The Cut Cut Cut Act" would be a great name for the GOP tax bill.

So what the hell was he talking about? First off, let's frame this by repeating that this is a lie all the way through: Democrats are not pushing a bill for open borders; we're just explaining where Trump's lie came from, OK? Turns out he's lying about the bill Dianne Feinstein introduced in June to end Trump's family separation policy. And yes, all Democrats in the Senate did co-sponsor it. That's about all the reality involved here. The actual name of the bill was the "Keep Families Together Act," which expert linguists agree doesn't even anagram to "the open borders bill" being completely bereft of the letters b, n, and l .

Without getting too deep into it, Republicans had argued -- based on a claim from wingnut organ The   Federalist, so you know it was absolute truth -- that the bill was too broadly written. Unclear language in the bill, if left unchanged, would supposedly have unintentionally hamstrung federal law enforcement agencies from arresting any parent of a minor child, since that would result in their being separated, you see? Also, the critics claimed, the bill would have prohibited federal officers from arresting any parent "within 100 miles" of the border or any port of entry -- and since international airports are ports of entry, that would include large chunks of territory well inside the USA.

Mind you, if the bill had moved forward, those flaws could have been revised -- even the Federalist and the GOP discussed them as unintended effects, not the point of the bill. But why would anyone on the right bother with that when they could go with the claim that that's what the Democrats wanted all along? Over at Dead Breitbart's Home for Quivering White Paranoia, senior editor-at-large Joel Pollak appears to have been firstto go with the "every single Democrat" backs stopping LEOs from doing their jobs! line on June 19, then shortly after that, another Breitbart piece offered this even bigger lie, which of course went completely unsourced:

In legislation led by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), the Democrats are demanding that all immigration and border enforcement be ended across the U.S., allowing the 12 to 30 million illegal aliens living in the country and all future illegal aliens to be free to travel back and forth across the hemisphere without enforcement or protections for Americans.

Every Democrat in the Senate signed onto Feinstein's open borders legislation.

And there you have it! The origins of a baldfaced lie by the "president" of the United States, months later, just waiting for him to add his made-up name to the thing. And yes, of course the rubes believe it's real, and are mad as hell about it. Again, we want to be absolutely clear here -- we're not saying there's even a grain of truth in what Trump said at the rally -- that would be like saying "flat Earthers have a point: NASA does say astronauts went to the moon." But it's at least of academic interest to see how his public lies evolve.

Now, if you don't mind, we have a busy day of forcing women to get abortions and covering up 19th-century Democrats' devotion to slavery to get to.

[ Daniel Dale on Twitter / Dara Lind on Twitter / CBS News / GOP.com ]

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