There is good reason to be skeptical about President Trump’s Oval Office address tonight.  If past is prologue the speech promises to be a fact checker’s nightmare. Of all the topics Trump has lied about, immigration is hands down number one.  From The Washington Post’s Daily 202:

Through the end of 2018, The Washington Post Fact Checker team documented 7,645 false or misleading claims made by Trump since taking office. Of those, 1,130 were about immigration. Claims about foreign policy and trade tied for second, with 822 claims, followed by claims about the economy (768).

One recent glaring example was when Trump said some former presidents told him they should have built a border wall, a contention that has been denied by all four living ex-presidents.

Then there’s the campaign promise that Mexico would pay for the border wall. From The Post:

Trump has publicly promised at least 212 times that Mexico would pay for the wall, and he’s now falsely insisted five times in just the past three weeks that Mexico will still pay because of the revisions to NAFTA.

“This is a nonsense claim,” Glenn Kessler, the director of The Post’s Fact Checker unit, writes in a fresh post this morning. “The president has already earned a Bottomless Pinocchio for claiming that the United States loses money on trade deficits. Now, he’s claiming that the ‘savings’ from his trade deal will pay for the border wall. … The trade deficit with Mexico climbed in 2018. It may climb again in 2019.

Then there’s the notion that anyone might be swayed by an Oval Office address.  Not likely. From the Early Returns column at Bloomberg:

Going public – the strategy of trying to win support from the people at large, in the hopes that they’ll pressure their representatives to follow the president – mostly didn’t work for Ronald Reagan, didn’t work for Bill Clinton, and didn’t work for Obama. It’s even less likely to work for Trump, who is less popular now than those presidents were for most of their time in office, and who is trying to sell a policy that consistently polls badly.

But what’s really changed are the viewing options:

When Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter spoke to the nation, viewers were pretty much held hostage, barring the truly radical option of turning off the set. By Clinton’s time, there were plenty of other choices available; these days, many viewers won’t have any idea that the president has pre-empted normal network programming.