In perhaps Donald Trump’s most disgusting move yet in the fight to build his monument to racism along the border of the United States and Mexico, he is reportedly considering a plan that he was briefed on that would take money that has been allocated for disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico and use that money to start the wall.
This could be the emergency declaration that Trump has been threatening to use in order to build the wall, although his previous explanations have all somewhat awkwardly claimed that he would “use the shutdown money” to build it in the event that he called a national emergency. That’s an odd claim since the shutdown is literally about NOT having money, but you never know with all of the strange jazz that comes out of Trump’s mouth.
It could also be that once he got the idea in his head that he could do the wall as some sort of “executive order” of sorts, that his team got to work on figuring out how to make it happen and keep the boss happy. That’s the possibility that sounds a little more likely to me, because the entire proposition sounds like someone sat him down and explained what he could get without Democrats supporting it, and without backing down from the government shutdown, a political gambit that’s been going on nearly three weeks and has done nothing more than starve families who depend on their federal jobs to live and land Trump in yet another messy court case, this time being sued by his own Border Patrol for making them work without pay.
What’s more, what he could get for the $4.9 billion he would be stealing from CA and PR is very definitely a compromise — not a concrete wall or even a “see-through” steel slat wall as he’s been discussing, but a bollard-style wall with “features” designed to “discourage” climbers. Bollards are those vertical poles in parking lots and park walkways that just exist to keep you from fitting a car between them.
If Trump uses this method and settles for a bollard wall, it will be more than apparent that it was never about border security for the President. It was just about getting the win.
Featured image via screen capture
