While 800,000 federal employees are waking up today to a paycheck-less payday because of the government shutdown, Donald Trump is hard at work trying to figure out a way to finance his border wall using our hard-earned taxpayer dollars. Since Trump is now claiming that he never meant that Mexico was actually going to pay for the wall (even though he said it repeatedly for nearly four years!), his administration is instead looking into taking money designated for disaster areas in order to build the wall.
Under this plan, Trump would declare a national emergency and take funds from a $13.9 billion budget that has been set aside for the Army Corps of Engineers for civil works projects around the country—including in Puerto Rico, which remains in complete disarray due to the impact of Hurricane Maria. According to NBC News:
The money was set aside to fund projects all over the country including storm-damaged areas of Puerto Rico through fiscal year 2020, but the checks have not been written yet and, under an emergency declaration, the president could take the money from these civil works projects and use it to build the border wall ...
It almost sounds too cruel to be true. Almost. After all, you’d have to be completely inhumane to take money away from people who are already suffering and projects designed to prevent catastrophes. But then, it really comes as no surprise. Donald Trump has shown that he has no empathy or concern for anyone. We watched in horror as he ignored and insulted the people of Puerto Rico after a devastating Category 5 hurricane and then patted himself on the back for throwing paper towels at them and for “saving lives”—even though thousands of people died. So there really isn’t any depth he won’t sink to, particularly if it means Puerto Rico continues to languish in despair. He’ll just continue to ignore what’s happening on the island. And since he originally blamed Puerto Ricans for throwing his “budget out of whack” in the first place, he probably thinks this money is fair game anyway.
Trump can’t get money for a wall that no one wants any other way, so he’s about to rob public coffers to pay for it. What’s even more frightening is that, if he follows through with this plan, he could potentially use more money than he originally requested to build more miles of the wall. While the initial proposal was $5.7 billion for 234 miles of wall, with this plan, he could dip into the Army Corps budget and take more money to build 315 miles of wall.
How much more despicable can this administration get? It is actually willing to steal money for the people and places that face real disasters in order to finance its made-up one. For the record, there is absolutely no crisis at the border. There is, however, a major crisis facing American democracy, and that is 100 percent because Donald Trump is in the White House.