Does Donald Trump know Colorado is not a border state?
The question engulfed Washington overnight, after the president said at a political rally in Pittsburgh that his administration is building an international border wall in the Rocky Mountain state.
“You know why we’re going to win New Mexico?” Trump told the crowd on Wednesday, talking about a bona fide border state, which he lost in 2016. “Because they want safety on their border. And they didn’t have it. And we’re building a wall on the border of New Mexico, and we’re building a wall in Colorado. We’re building a beautiful wall. A big one that really works, that you can’t get over, that you can’t get under.”
Trump habitually exaggerates the state of construction of his border wall, but the line qualified as impressively false even out of his mouth. The southern border of Colorado is about 400 miles from Mexico.
The governor of Colorado, Democrat Jared Polis, dunked on Trump on Twitter.
“Well, this is awkward,” Polis wrote. “… Colorado doesn’t border Mexico. Good thing Colorado now offers free full-day kindergarten so our kids can learn basic geography.”
Others on social media suggested that if the Trump administration does set out to build a border wall in Colorado, perhaps New Mexico, which borders Colorado to the south, would pay for it.
Others compared the moment to an episode in Trump’s follies from earlier this year, in which the president, sitting in the Oval Office and holding up a map, tried to defend his assertion that Hurricane Dorian threatened the state of Alabama, an assertion that became known as “Sharpiegate” and the National Weather Service had hurried to try to correct. On Trump’s map, someone had used a heavy black marker to alter the projected course of the storm.
https://t.co/fmE0hiPLNB pic.twitter.com/gMzNIcl5Qu
— Sen. Patrick Leahy (@SenatorLeahy) October 23, 2019
Trump was up after midnight on Twitter trying to control the fallout. As with his past outrageous riffs, recently including one in which he asked China to investigate his political rival Joe Biden, the explanation was he was only kidding – it was a joke!
Trump tweeted (spelling his):
(Kiddingly) We’re building a Wall in Colorado”(then stated, “we’re not building a Wall in Kansas but they get the benefit of the Wall we’re building on the Border”) refered to people in the very packed auditorium, from Colorado & Kansas, getting the benefit of the Border Wall!
While some Trump superfans do travel great distances to attend his rallies, the presence or not of Coloradans and Kansans in the Pittsburgh crowd could not be established.