Haberman: Trump Didn’t Want to Give Oval Office Speech and Thinks Trip to Border Is Waste of Time

EXCERPT:

HABERMAN: "I think it's certainly an evolution. I don’t know how durable that evolution is, as we’ve seen throughout the process. The President’s advisers, even the Vice President will say something only to be undercut by the President a little bit later. it certainly was the goal of this speech, was to project more heart into it. And aides have told most of us that throughout the day, he was going to try to put more of a humanitarian face on this. Humanitarian has been the word Democrats have been using about — there’s a crisis at the border, they just don’t agree on what the crisis is. What I was struck by watching the speech, as I heard from several sources throughout the day, the President wasn’t really into doing this speech. A lot of his advisers were, a lot of his friends on Capitol Hill thought he should do this. There’s a reason he hasn’t done an address like this in the course of the last two years, because he hasn’t wanted to. And I think you saw it tonight why he hasn't wanted to. It's just not a natural setting for him, and we didn’t hear a whole lot new. We certainly heard a whole lot, although less than usual of things that were not true. They’re still talking past each other, these two sides. And what the President didn’t get into is Democrats have a lot of objections to is the cuts to the legal immigration. So while he talks about the crisis at the border, and he talks about the dangers of illegal immigration, he’s also trying to cut back on people that are coming in legally. That’s a huge sticking point."