My fellow Americans. (The president addresses the nation from the Oval Office, carried without comment from network to network, because ... why not!) The only thing you have to fear is ... not having a wall. The only thing you have to fear is what is on the other side of the wall.
Fear itself is not something to be afraid of. Fear is something to be embraced. Fear is something to be belched forth from the Oval Office at regular intervals, carried on all major networks. Fear is, for lack of a better word, good.
Here is a string of numbers, cobbled bafflingly together to present an image of a nightmarish invasion. There! The crisis is real, now. Here are apparently random statistics. Your mother will become one of these statistics, as will your most cherished uncle, as will your puppy and your wife and your wife's mother (unless you dislike her) if you do not permit the building of the wall now.
Here is a terrifying farrago of semi-facts strung together from misleading Fox News clips and things misheard in dreams. The only solution to any of these problems is to build the wall, though it has no logical connection to anything mentioned. It will solve everything. This administration is determined to do its best to undermine everything that might make someone want to come to this country. We will build a wall. We will stop the national prosperity that is drawing people to this country. We will make this place as awful as possible and as terrifying as possible. Fill it with fear and horror. Then people will turn around. Then maybe we will not even need the wall.
If you are opposed to the building of this particular wall, you oppose walls in general. How do your houses stand? What do you hang pictures on? Into what kind of socket do you plug your electronics? If walls are so evil, what about the success of "Wall-E"? What about "Wonderwall," a so-called popular song by the so-called band Oasis? What about that Robert Frost poem, which I've definitely read and am not just alluding to because it has a wall in the title? Are we just going to tear down EVERY wall, like some kind of Gorbachev run amok? Because that's not an America I want to live in. What's next, DOORS? WINDOWS?
And a house without walls, like a house divided against itself, cannot stand. I think it was Abraham Lincoln (a man who did something very important, and especially at that time) who said that.
Why do people build walls? Not because they hate the people outside, but because they love the people inside. That's deep. They should put that on a card, or an ill-advised "Game of Thrones"-themed poster.
What is coming over the border is not people but drugs and monsters. You must remember this. "They are not sending their best," as a wise voice said, a voice that now speaks from the Oval Office without filter or question.
Drugs are coming over the border to behead your family. I say this with no great relish. Everything bad you have ever heard is true, but it is much worse than that. A cloud of locusts is coming to devour everything you love. It is even worse than that. I am not even able to say how bad it is, because it is terrifying. Blood. Horror. Missing limbs. No, never mind, I will say it. I will continue to say it.
They are coming for you. Make no mistake. Every nightmare you have ever had is on the march and is coming for you, unless you let us build the wall. The Democrats do not want the wall to be built. You do not need evidence of this. Hear the president's voice, and know. Drugs and the Vietnam War and every bad thing that has ever haunted you is coming.
Here is a thick nightmare cloud of misheard facts. They are coming, lumbering along, as I always said they were, though no one could see them but myself, on that escalator, years ago. They are coming and bringing every Bad Thing. Every week many drugs march across the border with murder in their eyes, and only one thing can stop them: this wall.
Build the wall. You must. It is the only way. It will take 45 minutes, be immediately effective and solve everything that is wrong in America, from poverty to tooth decay.
Thank you for your time.
The Democrats responded, in a long hallway, looking like something out of "The Shining," that the Government Shutdown Belongs In the President's Lap. Sure. That is true, too. But I am not sure it is sufficient to put all the nightmares back in the box.
Alexandra Petri | The Washington Post
Alexandra Petri is a Washington Post columnist offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.”