Patriot Brief

• Dana Bash acknowledged measurable improvements at the border under Donald Trump.

• On-air data contrasted Trump-era enforcement results with prior border conditions.

• The moment undercut years of media claims that Trump’s border policies were ineffective.

This is one of those moments the media hates because it happens live, with graphics, and there’s no real way to spin out of it afterward. Dana Bash didn’t offer an opinion. She didn’t editorialize. She walked viewers through the numbers — and the numbers told a story CNN has spent years trying not to tell.

Trump ran on border enforcement, promised results, and then delivered them. When a CNN anchor is forced to label that outcome a “story of accomplishment,” it’s not because she suddenly changed her politics. It’s because reality backed her into a corner. Charts don’t care about narratives. They don’t respond to outrage. They just sit there and quietly expose who was right.

That’s what made the moment land. For years, audiences were told border security was either impossible, cruel, or fake — sometimes all three at once. Then the data shows a sharp contrast once policy actually changed. Fewer releases. Tighter enforcement. Clear outcomes. No amount of verbal gymnastics can make that disappear.

This wasn’t a gaffe or a slip. It was something worse for Trump’s critics: confirmation. When even a network that built its brand on resisting him has to acknowledge results, it says more than a thousand campaign ads ever could.

The real takeaway isn’t that Dana Bash praised Trump. She didn’t. The takeaway is that, when confronted with evidence, even hostile media eventually has to stop pretending. And that’s exactly why moments like this matter.

From Western Journal:

CNN host Dana Bash admitted Thursday that President Donald Trump had turned around the situation on the U.S.-Mexico border in his first year since returning to the White House.

Upon taking office, Trump issued several executive orders to address illegal immigration, including designating Mexican drug cartels, the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua, and the Salvadoran prison gang MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations. Bash put up a series of charts showing the difference on the border between the Biden administration and the Trump administration.

“One of the things that you — many things that you’ve been covering in a very detailed way this year, Zolan, is what’s going on with immigration,” Bash told CNN political analyst Zolan Kanno-Youngs. “And our producer, Tess, put together a fantastic illustration of the difference in what’s happening in the border now versus what happened just in the year beforehand, which was Joe Biden’s presidency. Joe Biden’s presidency is green and Donald Trump’s is the yellow.”

“I mean, that tells a story of an accomplishment for the president, one that he definitely ran on,” Bash continued. “He definitely made a promise there, and yet there hasn’t been a lot of focus on that because of what he has been doing in the interior of the country, which he also promised to do, which is apprehend people who are in the United States illegally and deport them.”

The Border Patrol encountered millions of illegal immigrants during the Biden administration, according to figures released by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, many of whom were released into the United States. The Trump administration touted in a Dec. 15 release that no illegal immigrants had been released into the United States for seven straight months.

The Department of Homeland Security announced that over 2.5 million illegal immigrants have left the United States, of which 1.9 million elected to self-deport, in a Dec. 10 release.

The agency also noted in a Dec. 19 release summarizing operations for the entire year that it had accounted for over 129,000 unaccompanied minors that the Biden administration had been unable to account for, while also touting operations across the country, including those in the areas of Chicago, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Portland, Oregon.

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Photo Credit: (Paul Morigi / Getty Images for Fortune)