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Donald Trump Responds to Beto O’Rourke’s March for Truth in El Paso With Flagrant Lies

The president responded to a protest against his false claims about El Paso, led by its most famous resident, Beto O'Rourke, by lying about it.

EL PASO, TX - FEBRUARY 11: Beto O'Rourke speaks to the six thousand people that showed up to protest Trumps wall and rhetoric about El Paso. Local El Paso leaders along with Border Network for Human Rights and the Womens March El Paso oraganized the event to counter Trumps rally in El Paso, TX February 11, 2019 in El Paso, Texas. (Photo by Christ Chavez/Getty Images)
Beto O'Rourke addressed thousands in El Paso on Monday ahead of Donald Trump's rally. Photo: Christ Chavez/Getty Images)

In El Paso, Texas, on Monday night, President Donald Trump responded to the March for Truth — a protest against his false claims about the city led by its most famous resident, Beto O’Rourke — by lying about it.

In remarks transmitted live and uncorrected by news networks, Trump claimed that a crowd of about 13,000 supporters at his rally in the city numbered, “let’s say 35,000 people,” while the march addressed by O’Rourke had drawn, at most, “300 people.” El Paso’s police department estimated that the number of protesters was in fact between 10,000 and 15,000.

While skeptics following events online could find out the truth, networks like ABC shared Trump’s entirely false claims on social networks with no indication that they were untrue, suggesting that a core error in coverage of his 2016 campaign looks set to be repeated for 2020.

“He has long since figured out something important, and perhaps dangerous,” Ray Suarez, the veteran broadcaster, observed on Twitter about Trump’s willingness to lie. “He knows it doesn’t really matter if he tells the truth about the O’Rourke crowd, or his own. By tomorrow morning, who’s going to care beyond those who already care? He may gain little, but loses nothing.”

Video of O’Rourke’s 22-minute speech, shared by the potential candidate for the presidency, showed that thousands of marchers had indeed crowded onto a baseball diamond across from the arena where the president’s rally took place, to hear their former member of Congress call out Trump’s lies about the city’s crime rate.

Far from being a city saved from violent crime only by the construction of a border wall in 2008, as Trump had falsely claimed during his State of the Union speech, O’Rourke stressed that El Paso’s crime rate had already plummeted before the partial barrier was constructed.

As Bob Moore and Carlos Sanchez reported for the Texas Tribune, Trump opened his speech, beneath banners reading “Finish the Wall,” with the blatant lie that construction of a border wall along the Texas-Mexico border was underway. “I don’t know if you heard, right, today we started a big, beautiful wall right on the Rio Grande, right smack on the Rio Grande,” Trump claimed, falsely. When the president’s supporters launched into the familiar chant, “Build the wall,” the former real estate developer invited them to pretend along with him: “You mean, ‘Finish the wall.'”

Trump later continued his long-running war on observable reality by claiming, without evidence, that El Paso’s Republican mayor had manipulated the FBI statistics that showed a sharp drop in violent crime before the construction of the barrier.

The president’s attempt to clear a path for his lies by attacking the media once again incited his supporters to such hostility that one even attacked a cameraperson for the BBC.

Trump supporters, desperate to combat credible reports from journalists on the ground, and the crowd-size estimates of local fire and police officials, resorted to circulating screenshots of the protest taken nearly an hour after O’Rourke’s speech ended.

Trump’s attempt to gaslight the nation about his popularity in El Paso relative to that of O’Rourke was clearly pre-planned, since his lie about the rival protest march drawing only a few hundred people was promoted before his speech by both his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, and his son, Donald Trump Jr. — who introduced his father by falsely claiming that “about 200 people” were at the “Beto rally,” and then posted a photograph of what he said was a crowd of 35,000 waiting for the president to speak.

Even before leaving the White House for El Paso, Trump had hinted that his decision to hold his first campaign rally of the year in O’Rourke’s hometown on the Mexican border was at least partly an attempt to show up a potential rival. Hours before the rally, Trump bragged, “We have a line that is very long already. … And I understand our competitor’s got a line too, but it’s a tiny little line.”

IT’S EVEN WORSE THAN WE THOUGHT.

What we’re seeing right now from Donald Trump is a full-on authoritarian takeover of the U.S. government. 

This is not hyperbole.

Court orders are being ignored. MAGA loyalists have been put in charge of the military and federal law enforcement agencies. The Department of Government Efficiency has stripped Congress of its power of the purse. News outlets that challenge Trump have been banished or put under investigation.

Yet far too many are still covering Trump’s assault on democracy like politics as usual, with flattering headlines describing Trump as “unconventional,” “testing the boundaries,” and “aggressively flexing power.” 

The Intercept has long covered authoritarian governments, billionaire oligarchs, and backsliding democracies around the world. We understand the challenge we face in Trump and the vital importance of press freedom in defending democracy.

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IT’S BEEN A DEVASTATING year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

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I’M BEN MUESSIG, The Intercept’s editor-in-chief. It’s been a devastating year for journalism — the worst in modern U.S. history.

We have a president with utter contempt for truth aggressively using the government’s full powers to dismantle the free press. Corporate news outlets have cowered, becoming accessories in Trump’s project to create a post-truth America. Right-wing billionaires have pounced, buying up media organizations and rebuilding the information environment to their liking.

In this most perilous moment for democracy, The Intercept is fighting back. But to do so effectively, we need to grow.

That’s where you come in. Will you help us expand our reporting capacity in time to hit the ground running in 2026?

We’re independent of corporate interests. Will you help us?

Donate

Contact the author:

robert.mackey@theintercept.com @RobertMackey on X

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