Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.
The promise: Candidate Trump promises to build a wall on the southern border of the continental United States.
Results So Far: No new border wall has been built as of this writing (November, 2019), despite Trump’s many florid claims to the contrary.
It is true that certain parts of the barrier that predates the Trump Administration on certain parts of the southern border have been replaced during the Trump Administration, but, for the fair-minded observer, this is not equivalent to building the wall; it’s merely upkeep.
To be fair, one does not simply erect a wall. Like any such building project, financing must be arranged; contractors attracted and signed; problem analyzed, designs created, validated, and accepted; and land acquired. Only then may actual construction commence. Here’s Trump’s progress on these fronts, as I understand it.
Financing. This is perhaps the highest profile failure of the Trump Administration in building the wall, as he likes to put it at campaign rallies. Congress holds the power of the purse, it’s true, but for the first two years of Trump’s term in office he had compliant GOP allies in control of both the House and the Senate. It stands to reason that adequate appropriations could have been arranged, but nothing occurred as the White House leadership permitted its attention to be distracted by other issues, such as tax reform and healthcare. When the GOP lost control of the House at the 2018 midterm elections, a shocked President Trump attempted to demand funding for the wall from the House, now controlled by the Democrats, precipitating a funding crisis as the Federal debt ceiling was pierced. In the following months, professionals Speaker of the House Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Schumer (D-NY) easily crushed the amateur politician Trump, forcing him to accept a deal dictated by the Democrats which had no wall funding. Trump then resorted to declaring a National Emergency; this decision resulted in numerous court cases, the latest result of which that I can find is Trump losing in U.S. District Court in early October; he’s lost in other Courts as well, but the conservative wing of SCOTUS may eventually side with him. Time will tell.
Contractors attracted and signed. This is the sort of thing the U.S. Government does everyday, and it has cut and dried procedures for it. Yet, there has been some controversy in this part of the process, as President Trump has attempted to interfere with the selection of contractors.
Problem analyzed, designs created, validated, and accepted. President Trump has interfered in this process as well, changing the requirements by changing how long the wall should be, requiring the wall have a certain look (at one time transparent!), that it be built in a certain way, and while he may or may not have a certain expertise in appearance, deriving from his days as a reality TV star, his interference generally results in inferior products. This has been illustrated with some of the replacement wall, built to his specifications, reportedly being easily pierced by Mexican smugglers.
Land acquired. Some portions of the southern border are actually privately owned land, thus requiring that land be either bought or “taken,” and this has caused an uproar from those owners. I do wonder if an easement is possible, but I have not seen any mentions of such a concept.
The Bigger Picture: The border wall has been the most popular aspect of Trump’s political career, and also the most cause of what appears to be mendacity as he has repeatedly lied and mislead the public about the status of the wall.
The future of the wall remains hazy, as financing remains a question mark in the courts and in Congress. And its efficacy remains a highly controversial topic, as I’ve discussed in the past.
But, more importantly, I wonder if Trump and the media have really misinterpreted the point of the Build The Wall! chants that erupt at Trump’s ongoing campaign rallies. At their heart, they are about concerns about immigration, the impact of cheap labor on local labor markets, and the impact of foreign cultural constructs on local cultural identity. Are they really a call for building the wall, or are they simply a way to communicate the concerns I’ve just listed, and that Trump should be investigating why immigrants are attempting to come to the United States, and how to ameliorate those conditions in the homelands of the immigrants?
I know I’ve brought this up before, but it bears repeating. Trump could become a far more effective leader if he brought this sort of thinking to his Administration.
