President Donald Trump dropped a falsehood in a tirade to reporters as he landed at Mar-a-Lago in Florida for the weekend.
Trump walked toward the cameras on the tarmac Friday afternoon to address reporters without answering questions. He launched into a tirade about the government shutdown, which he has struggled to blame on Democrats:
PRESIDENT DONALD: So the shutdown continues. The Republican Party is not going to pay $1.5 trillion to illegal immigrants coming into our country.
They come in for all kinds of reasons, they come from jails, from prisons, from everywhere, from Venezuela, many countries. We're not going to do that.
So the closure continues. It's a democratic shutdown. It's Schumer's shutdown because his career has failed and is over.
But CNN's Daniel Dalehas, among other things, debunked that $1.5 trillion claim and explained where it comes from:
Leaving aside the subjective but dubious claim that Democrats want to destroy others' health care — Democrats propose reversing Trump-approved cuts to Medicaid and other health care programs and extending the enhanced pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies, which are expected to expire at the end of this year — they are not proposing to spend $1.5 trillion to undocumented immigrants. Undocumented people are not eligible for Obamacare subsidies or federal Medicaid insurance coverage (hospitals are required to provide emergency care to people regardless of immigration status or ability to pay).
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a budget watchdog group, estimated that the spending proposal Democrats released in September would increase the national debt by $1.5 trillion over the next decade. But that figure does not specifically refer to undocumented people. And the White House itself has claimed that Democrats are proposing to spend about $193 billion — far less than Trump's “$1.5 trillion” — on health care for “illegal immigrants and other noncitizens,” our emphasis. The White House published an itemized list making clear that even by its own disputed calculations, the bulk of even that smaller amount would be for these “other noncitizens” legally resident in the US.
