President donald trump he spouted a huge falsehood in a rant to reporters when he landed in Florida for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump approached cameras on the tarmac Friday afternoon to address reporters without answering questions. He went on a tirade about the government shutdown that he has trouble blaming on Democrats:
PRESIDENT DONALD: So the shutdown continues. The Republican Party is not going to pay a billion and a half dollars to illegal immigrants who come to our country.
Entering for many reasons, coming from prisons, from prisons, from everywhere, from Venezuela, from many countries. We’re not going to do that.
So the closure continues. It’s a Democratic shutdown. It’s Schumer’s closure because his career failed and it’s over.
But CNN Daniel DaleAmong others, he has debunked that $1.5 trillion claim and explained where it comes from:
Leaving aside the subjective but dubious claim that Democrats are trying to destroy others’ health care (Democrats are proposing to reverse Trump-approved cuts to Medicaid and other health programs and extend enhanced pandemic-era Obamacare subsidies that are scheduled to expire at the end of the year), they are not proposing spending $1.5 trillion on immigrants undocumented. Undocumented people are not eligible for either Obamacare subsidies or federal Medicaid insurance coverage (hospitals must provide emergency care to people regardless of their immigration status or ability to pay).
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a fiscal watchdog group, estimated that the spending proposal Democrats released in September would add $1.5 trillion to the debt over the next decade. But that figure does not refer particularly to the undocumented. And the White House itself has stated that Democrats propose spending 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 released a detailed list that makes clear that even by its own disputed calculations, the majority of that even smaller sum would go to these “other noncitizens” who are legally in the United States.