You’d probably never guess that most Texans oppose Donald Trump’s border wall from watching Fox & Friends’ softball interview with a pro-wall rancher this morning. And that’s probably just what the show intended.
Host Steve Doocy introduced rancher Ruperto Escobar by saying excitedly, “One Texas rancher says he’s willing to give up a part of his own 600 acres of land that’s been in his family for 250 years for the construction of the wall!” Doocy. in concert with the lower-third banner, repeatedly noted that Escobar is a seventh-generation rancher, just in case any viewers thought he might be a recent immigrant of the sort that Trump has demonized.
Escobar said the problems he deals with are “primarily drug trafficking.” However, he also said, “The illegal immigrants traveling through there are not so prominent anymore like they used to be.” He complained about “people that get caught with their vehicles full of drugs” who then “speed back towards the river at a very high velocity past my house, a whole slew of police after them.” He added, “And then these individuals park those loaded Suburbans and things like that, right by the bank of the Rio Grande and jump in the water and off they go and they leave everything there.”
A lengthy Texas Tribune profile of Escobar in 2016 (when Barack Obama was still president) reported that ramped-up security had greatly eased the problem of smugglers and drugs crossing his land. What happened since then? Would a wall really be the best solution? Predictably, Doocy didn’t delve into any of it.
Instead, Doocy showed a graphic showing over 162,000 border apprehensions in the Rio Grande Valley that was clearly designed to suggest a need for a border wall all over. “It proves your point that there’s a lot going on on your particular land,” Doocy said. He continued suggestively, “I know you say you would donate your land to the federal government for it.” Then he prodded Escobar to attack Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi by asking for the rancher’s response to her calling a wall “immoral.”
Escobar said, “Ma’am, I don’t know where you get your facts. … Seeing the number of illegals coming across here trampling over our fences, the drug dealers turn down our gates, that is immoral, and we’re tired of it. We need that wall.”
But here are some facts Doocy couldn’t be bothered with: The majority of drugs and people smuggled into the U.S. come across bridges and through ports of entry. Most Texans along the border don’t want the wall. Texas voters statewide oppose the wall 51 - 45 percent, according to a Quinnipiac poll in July. The Washington Post reported recently that “nearly every state and federal official who represents a district along the border is opposed” to the wall.
Instead, Doocy gave Escobar a validating stamp of approval as he closed the interview: “Making it loud and clear.”
Watch Doocy mislead viewers below, from the January 23, 2018 Fox & Friends.