The wall is the most visible part of Trump’s set of promises, and even his supporters are unlikely to be put off long by a picket fence authorized under President Obama.
Trump is feeling the heat. Failure to build The Wall may be the one thing that causes The Base to desert him. (President Business Deals echoed this himself when he begged the President of Mexico not to say in public they won't pay.)
That heat has Trump trying to steal money from the military.
After floating the notion to several advisers last week, he told House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) that the military should pay for the wall, according to three people familiar with the meeting last Wednesday in the White House residence. Ryan offered little reaction to the notion, these people said, but senior Capitol Hill officials later said it was an unlikely prospect.
Again on Wednesday, Trump talked about how the wall “has started” how “beautiful” it is and reminded people to look at the pictures he posted on Wednesday. Pictures of a fence. Paid for, designed, planned, and scheduled before Trump appeared on the scene.
The truth is that Trump’s whole “Build that wall!” theme is just another of the quips floated, tested, and refined by Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica that Trump wandered on stage to say.
Where did the ideas that animated the candidate’s packed rallies — and juiced voter turnout in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio — come from? “Build the wall!”? “Drain the swamp!”? “Crooked Hillary!”? “Deep state!”? Defining immigrants as violent gangs or murderous thugs? Painting American’s urban neighborhoods as crime-infested ratholes.
In a stunning week of revelations, we now know the answer. The core messages of the president’s underlying xenophobia and racism that animated his base didn’t emerge from the mind of “very stable genius” Trump (despite a long life of troubling racial attitudes). Instead, the nonstop undercurrent of hate toward The Other in American life was focus-grouped, computer-coded, deliberately amplified by a new ultra-right-wing media echo chamber and then targeted with cruise-missile precision at the handful of states that Trump won by roughly 100,000 votes to grab the Electoral Vote.
Now Trump has to face the fact that the wall he promised in every rally, debate, and commercial … has not a dime to start funding. So instead he’s just telling his supporters that the Big Beautiful Wall is underway and showing them pictures of a short length of fence that divides a road on Calexico. Because he has no respect for his supporters, and has every faith they’ll believe anything he tells them.
Trump should just use pictures of the border wall from the 2010 film, Monsters. It’s much more impressive — and it wouldn’t be any more of a lie.
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