Texas — President Trump visited the border town of Alamo, Texas, on Tuesday, the first time he’s spoken publicly since last week’s attack on the Capitol by right-wing extremists. The visit marks the president’s final trip to the border wall during his term in office. The construction of the wall, and the failed promise that Mexico would foot the bill, was the bellwether issue of his presidential campaign.

The speech was planned, ostensibly, to celebrate the construction of 450 miles of wall. Approximately 47 miles of new construction have gone up where no previous border wall had existed, according to CNN. The other 400 or so miles are a replacement of old, neglected barriers.

Before launching into roughly half an hour of effusive praise for border control agents, Trump addressed both his looming second impeachment, which he characterized as “the greatest and most vicious witch-hunt in the history of our country,” and the attacks on the Capitol building last week.

“Millions of our citizens watched on Wednesday as a mob stormed the Capitol and trashed the halls of government,” he said. “As I have consistently said throughout my administration, we believe in respecting America's history and traditions, not tearing them down. We believe in the rule of law, not in violence or rioting.”

The president dismissed the possibility of Vice President Mike Pence and half of the Cabinet invoking the 25th Amendment, which Democratic leaders have publicly encouraged Pence to take.

"The 25th Amendment is of zero risk to me, but will come back to haunt Joe Biden and the Biden administration," Trump said, baselessly. "As the expression goes, be careful what you wish for."

After touching on the “tremendous success developing a vaccine years before it was thought even remotely possible,” the president spent much of his time in Alamo thanking various law enforcement officials — only veering off once into a brag about his election numbers among Hispanics in Texas’s border towns.

“This is a real success story,” the president said of the wall. “When I took office, we inherited a broken, dysfunctional, and open border. Everybody was pouring in … We reformed our immigration system and achieved the most secure Southern border in U.S. history. We took on the coyotes and the special interests. And we restored the rule of law.”

Trump rattled off a number of unverified claims to support this statement, including the arrest of nearly 500,000 illegal immigrants with criminal records, removing some 20,000 gang members from the country, and what he called “the end of asylum fraud.”

“Under the old broken system, if you merely requested asylum, you were released into the country — the most ridiculous thing anyone’s ever seen,” he said, despite the fact this is verifiably false, and omitting the fact that the U.S. has turned away a record number of asylum seekers since he took office. “We would take it in some people that you didn't want to have in your country.

“We instituted a series of historic policy changes to shut down asylum fraud,” he continued. “This includes the groundbreaking agreement with Mexico known as the Migrant Protection Protocols or MPP. Under this agreement, if an illegal alien requests asylum, they have to wait in Mexico until their cases are heard. They used to wait here. And when they were waiting, they would say “bye-bye,” and then disappear somewhere into our country … This one measure alone ended a humanitarian crisis and saved countless lives. And especially, I have to say, lives from crime.”

The rest of Trump’s speech was spent voicing his hope that the next administration would not undo his accomplishments in border control, immigration reform, and national security.

Trump's visit to Alamo took local officials by surprise. The city manager said in a press release Monday afternoon that the city administration “had not been officially contacted regarding this visit and therefore, have no details regarding his itinerary.”