The New York Times, ever on the lookout for rural diner-frequenting Americans to interview, presents evidence that nobody wants Trump's stupid dumb wall, especially the people who actually live near the damn border, part eleventy-two.
“Enough about the wall already,” she said. “We have other problems here that need fixing.”
In fairness to the Times, this was an interview in a cafe, not a diner. My apologies. Also in fairness, when you're in towns as rural as some of these ones are, your options are to accost people at the local cafe and/or diner or to hide behind a row of mailboxes and jump out when the mailman comes by, and that second option might end up with you getting shot, so we critics might be getting a bit oversensitive on this one.
Anyhoo, nobody wants Donald Trump's stupid dumb wall. The people whose land would be seized to build the thing don't want it. The experts who estimate the expected dollar efficiency of these things don't want it. People who live in towns along the border don't want it, and think Donald Trump is making everything worse and yes, upon a re-re-re-inspection of those towns by the Times, the answer remains what it was all the other times.
Many said there was indeed a humanitarian crisis unfolding, but they blamed the Trump administration for worsening it with a series of policies aimed at deterring Central American migrants from making the journey.
Farming and ranching communities in fact still rely heavily on immigrant labor, and if you don't believe us you can check in again with Trump-defending Rep. Devin Nunes' own family operation in Iowa. (Again, though, might want to be wary of gunfire.) Americans in border towns would not be shy about demanding the American government protect them if even one-tenth of the mayhem Trump frothed about in his speeches was happening in their streets. It's not. Americans would be demanding the president ultra-uber-Jade-Helm his way through the state of Texas if half of what Donald Trump was claiming was true. They’re not.
This leaves, then, the obvious question of just who the hell Donald Trump is really trying to appease with his stupid dumb wall, and from every past bit of journalism ever the answer still appears to be "obsessive racists, many of whom live in Donald Trump's imagination." This is why the government is shut down; this is, apparently, the hill his remaining base would most like to die on.
But it isn't because the Americans with the closest ties to the border have been demanding the stupid thing.