The fact in question is that President Trump was shutting down the government to leverage for funding of the border wall he plans to build between Mexico and the United States. This was an event that happened back in late 2018 going into early 2019. Trump had been forcing the government to completely shut down. Federal workers were not getting their paychecks, and therefore couldn’t afford basic necessities like food and rent. 800,000 people were either furloughed (given temporary leave) or required to work without payment dates during this time. This caused outcry in the general public, and left the Senate desperately searching for a solution that could satisfy Trump’s desire to build the wall. It lasted so long because there were certain conditions that the President refused to meet, such as granting citizenship to the “dreamer” immigrants of Mexico.
According to Wikipedia, the shutdown started on December 22nd when Senate Democrats refused to support a continuing resolution on the US budget that included roughly $5.7 billion for the border wall to be built. The shutdown was the longest in American history, lasting 35 days. Searching for this article was easy, and there were multiple government shutdowns listed on a site that showed a graph of statistics, including the President at the time, the amount of workers furloughed, and how much it cost the country, roughly.
These facts can be seen as facts for multiple reasons. The first and foremost is that these facts are not skewed towards a political party. There is a non-bias in the fact that Trump was shutting down the government to negotiate the budget to fit the border wall. No matter whether a citizen supports or detests him for doing so, he is shutting down the government to fund his wall. The second is that many Americans were affected by this shutdown. Because so many people were affected by the shutdown in detrimental ways, there is a lot of information surrounding what a 35 day government shutdown does to the American people, especially those employed by the federal government. Memes like the one above are showing that this has reached a wide pool of people and became a hot button topic when it originally surfaced.
Finding this meme was a whole lot of digging through Google Images, if I’m being honest with you. There are too many political memes out there that either bash the reader for believing in certain beliefs or aren’t based in any sort of fact, being malicious for the sake of being malicious. A lot of them are also vague enough that, with the absolute timespan of the internet reaching far back and a presidency that is 3 years old, a viewer can never be sure that that is what the creator of the meme was referring to when they created it. But back when this was the main topic at hand, memes like this were pasted all over Facebook and Twitter.
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