Donald Trump is a terrible liar.
Some people misunderstand that statement because they believe it means that lies are terrible; therefore, Donald Trump tells a lot of terrible lies. Others think it means that Donald Trump is a terrible person who lies. While both of those things are true, Donald Trump is a terrible liar like I am a terrible ventriloquist; like Amanda Seales is a terrible party-crasher; like T.I. is terrible at using small words.
Donald Trump is terrible at telling lies.
Given the frequency and volume at which the president tosses out demonstrable untruths, it is astounding how horrible he is at fabricating falsehoods. It’s as if police officers became bad at shooting black people or Meghan Thee Stallion started twerking like Miley Cyrus. Or, perhaps, if Amanda Seales suddenly became an inconspicuous, gracious guest.
The latest example of this began on Sept. 19 when Trump held a press conference at the Mexican border to tout his impenetrable, unclimbable border wall that he was building with money he stole from military projects. During the event, Trump insinuated that his administration officials had tested the wall by gathering some of the best wall-climbers in the world to test the effectiveness of the stupid wall that experts say won’t stop drugs, migrants, terrorists or MS-13 gangbangers from entering the country. But, lest we forget, aside from being a terrible liar, Donald Trump is also dumb.
Here are the president’s remarks, according to the official White House transcript:
We actually built prototypes and we have, I guess you could say, world-class mountain climbers. We got climbers. We had 20 mountain climbers. That’s all they do; they love to climb mountains. They can have it. Me, I don’t want to climb mountains. But they’re very good. And some of them were champions. And we gave them different prototypes of walls, and this was the one that was hardest to climb.
And we’ve all seen the pictures of young people climbing walls with drugs on their back — a lot of drugs. I mean, they’re unbelievable climbers. This wall can’t be climbed. This is very, very hard.
And what the panel does on top, as I said, is structural, but it’s also very hard to get by panel. Plus, it’s designed to absorb heat, so it’s extremely hot. The wall is — you won’t be able to touch it. You can — you can fry an egg on that wall. It’s very, very hot.
So if they’re going to climb it, they’re going to have bring hoses and waters — water. And we don’t’ know where they’re going to hook it up, because there’s not a lot of water out here. So it’s a very, very hard thing to climb.
Well, that was a lie.
Rick Weber, a 75-year-old retired engineer and climbing enthusiast decided to build a replica of Trump’s wall, which I may or may not have mentioned was a stupid, stupid idea. According to the Courier-Journal, Weber tested the president’s theory by doing exactly what Trump claimed his administration had done. He invited the world’s best rock climbers to attempt to scale a prototype of the border wall, a wall commonly assumed to be stupid (I’m not sure I made that part clear).
But two days before Weber’s “Rocktoberfest” began, several climbers had already managed to climb the replica with relative ease, including 8-year-old Lucy Hancock, who climbed the wall without using any tools other than a belay, a safety device she didn’t even need. According to Time, it took climber Erik Kloeker 40 seconds to get up and over the dumb, dumb wall.
Here’s Lucy:
So maybe Trump was lying. Or maybe he ordered a batch of the wrong world-class climbers during his testing phase. Or maybe he is just stupid. We don’t necessarily have to pick one. What is inarguable is that we are spending billions of dollars on a wall that is of no use to America. But I have a better idea:
Maybe we can use this stupid wall to keep Amanda Seales out of the next cookout.
See? Everybody wins.