re: #82 Unshaken Defiance

Then you’ve got people trying to make excuses for Trump dissembling and saying that he didn’t mean it about the full wall, and that a smaller wall is acceptable.

Will 150 miles of new structure, where no barrier exists today, be considered a win for the wall? There are already 654 miles of existing barrier. He’s not even planning to build half of what his predecessors built before him.

— Sam Hopkins (@OhMrCharlie) January 11, 2019

That is plan for this/next year. Trump has often said he thought about 1000 miles of barrier needed. Congress has in past voted for about 700. In any event, not talking entire 1954-mile border.
https://t.co/ZDHllmuk2l

— Byron York (@ByronYork) January 11, 2019

Trump repeatedly called for the entire border to have a wall. He said Mexico pays for it.

These are the core planks to his entire immigration strategy that furthers white nationalist agenda.

Stop trying to dissemble and claim he’s wanting something different. https://t.co/QDiiO6j9en

— lawhawk (@lawhawk) January 11, 2019

Umm… no. Trump has lied about every aspect of the wall and immigration policy because it’s a dog whistle and white nationalist value signaling to his base that this is what they want and he’s fighting for it.

Trump repeatedly lies about the economics of the wall, from the cost to how much it’ll add to the economy (it wont).

Know what will grow the economy more? Improving and expanding immigration so that more people can come here legally. Why? Because those people consume goods and buy stuff and sell stuff and add value to the economy. They also create value and we would benefit from spending more on clearing the backlog of visa overstays (which is how and why most are here illegally now). Undocumented persons commit crimes at a far lower rate than native born Americans by a wide margin.

But the people who think that the dark skinned folks are coming to murder them in their sleep in their cabins in Montana are the ones who are furthest from the border.

Oh, and Trump self-pwned yesterday when DHS showed him stuff from a tunnel discovered under one of the wall segments we do have.

People can: go over, under, and through the border wall. Without constant cost of patrolling the border, it’s a meaningless blight on the landscape. There is no crisis but for the one Trump manufactured.

And Trump the great negotiator has no way out. He doesn’t have an exit plan and doesn’t know what he can do to end the shutdown without caving to Democrats.

That’s why he’s pushing the national emergency angle. He thinks he can use that to extort what he wants from Democrats. Except on that he undercuts himself when he claims Mexico is paying for the wall via the new deal. If Mexico’s paying, why shut down government, and then ask for ratification of his NAFTA 2.0 (USMCA) and appropriate the funds from the revenue? The reason is he doesn’t know what is in the deal, that’s not how it works, and he’s just baffling with BS some more. But someone has to keep calling him out for this and Democrats need to craft something that will pass both House and Senate and get enough votes to veto override anything Trump throws their way.

The longer this goes, the more pressure is on the GOP, which continues to enable this corrupt admin. He looks weaker by the day, precisely because he’s trying to claim an emergency and crisis when crossings are at multidecade lows and have been trending down for years.