On Tuesday, President Donald Trump will deliver a primetime address to the American people about the government shutdown he initiated and about the fake crisis at the US-Mexico border that he says justifies it.

And while there no doubt are various innovative coverage formats that could be used to fact-check the speech or otherwise detract from Trump’s tendency to deliberately misinform the public, there is no indication that any of them are going to be used. Instead, millions of people will see the president lying and misleading in various ways with no rebuttal, and at least some of them will come to believe some of the false things he says.

The question of whether, or how, to treat Trump differently from other presidents in light of his relentless dishonesty is an interesting one. But it’s noteworthy that just a few years ago, the networks were comfortable refusing to air a primetime Barack Obama speech about immigration on the grounds that the topic was “overtly political.”

Conservative pundits were, at the time, pushing the notion that Obama was essentially seizing power like a Latin American dictator, so essentially anything that refocused the conversation on banal policy details would have played to his advantage. TV networks, however, didn’t give him what he wanted, in part because it was November sweeps time, but officially because he was playing partisan politics rather than addressing a true national emergency.

Television news loves Republicans

This turnabout where George W. Bush gets free airtime to promote his immigration idea but then Obama doesn’t get free airtime for his ideas because it’s “overtly political,” and then Trump gets free airtime for an overtly political message on immigration, is striking.