WHO WILL WIN THE TRUMP BORDER WALL CONTEST?

...Examples of the controversial concrete Southern Border Walls

The border wall will not be paid for by Trump's trade bill with Mexico

OK, let’s talk about what the president has been asking for and his false statements.

The president said illegal immigrants are “poring over the southern border.”

False.  Even the experts have agreed that only 6 individuals were detained over the first half of last year at the southern border.  In fact, they also stated that more immigrants came over the northern border than the southern border, who are today over staying their visas.  Yes, it is Canadians that are the most immigrants that came here and are illegally over-staying their visas.  

Trump says his “Wall” will be paid for by the trade deal he has with Mexico.

False.  The deal with Mexico means that due to the tariffs Trump has placed on products from Mexico, it’s Americans that will be paying the extra costs, not Mexico.

It has been made very clear that the illegal drugs coming into the country are coming through existing checkpoints, not the areas where a border wall would be built.  In fact, the experts now say most of the drugs have been arriving through checkpoints, the mail, and through secret tunnels, not across the border.

Those people that are currently stuck waiting at the border are not terrorists or rapist and drug dealers.  Most are either families that are escaping from Central and South America seeking asylum, or are they are men wanting to find a job in the US.

It is obvious that Trump understands that his promise of a wall that Mexico would pay for is the #1 reason that he was elected.  He made it his job to scare the hell out of his base at all of his campaign rallies, and if he doesn’t come through with the Wall, he will lose a lot of his base supporters.  The new Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said that yes, she wants border security, but the Democrats want a 21^st Century answer for border security, not an 18^th Century answer of a wall.

Trump built a following among a group of Republican primary voters that carried him to the nomination, and then, using the same rhetoric of danger and fear, he leveraged a partisan loyalty to squeak past Hillary Clinton.  He lost the popular vote by almost 3 million votes, but he just barely won the electoral college by running the same race at the end, as he had at the beginning.

There was one lesson Trump took from that presidential race.  It was that the pundits are wrong, and villainizing immigrants from Mexico and the Middle East does work.

Trump has internalized the importance of holding the same core base of support that was with him early on.  He has maintained a focus on offering that same rhetoric that earned their support in the first place.  Trump's latest Oval Office address to the nation on border security was his way of saying "I’m sticking with that because if I don’t, my base will desert me."

From that perspective, it’s no surprise that Trump’s first Oval Office address to the country focused on stoking major fear of people crossing America’s southern border.

Sure, there was as usual, Trump’s use of misleading data on the flow of drugs from Mexico.  What’s amazing is that his own administration has admitted that the majority of illegal drugs, including heroin, come through those existing border checkpoints.

Sure, he argues that his revised NAFTA agreement that hasn’t even been ratified would somehow mean Mexico will pay for the wall, which it won’t.  But in his message, that’s not what he wanted Americans to focus on.

He instead tried to make Americans focus on a police officer murdered by an undocumented immigrant in California.  He also wanted the TV watchers to hear about a veteran brutally killed by another immigrant here illegally.  He wanted the audience to focus on all those gang members he lied about so often at his campaign rallies.  

Trump even stated “Over the last several years, I’ve met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible,” he said. “I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices, and the sadness gripping their souls. How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?”

Per Trump: “No one would wish to trade places with those whose loved ones were killed by immigrants in the country illegally, or with people who lost loved ones to criminals born and raised in the United States.”

Trump’s claimed at his initial campaign launch that migrants entering the United States from Mexico were all mostly criminals.  This was one of the first items he offered at his initial candidacy.  Unfortunately, both you and he know, that it wasn’t true.

The reality is that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, including those immigrants in the country illegally.

Of course, there are certainly examples of immigrants committing horrible crimes, just as there are examples of people from Canada committing horrible crimes, or some people named Donald committing horrible crimes.

But those criminals are outliers. Trump and his defenders will argue that the immigrants in the country shouldn’t have been here to commit those crimes in the first place.  However, Trump never presents evidence that a wall would have prevented those immigrants from being here.

Congress passed a law named after Kate Steinle, a woman who was accidentally shot to death by an undocumented immigrant in San Francisco.  The Department of Homeland Security was asked how the shooter had entered back into the country. They were never able to explain how he got back into the US.

Most of the people who are added to the ranks of those in the country illegally are those that have overstayed visas.  They are not terrorists or gang members, and most are Canadians.

In 2015, the Migration Policy Institute estimated that the number of Asian undocumented immigrants was growing much faster than arrivals from Mexico or Central America.  A few months later, an immigrant from China in the country illegally was sentenced to 125 years in prison for murdering an entire family in Brooklyn.  Despite Trump’s focus on crimes committed by immigrants, Trump somehow has never mentioned that case.

Setting aside the validity of any of Trump's arguments, it's worth asking why he keeps making them…?  There are very few Americans who are unaware of Trump's position on immigration from Mexico or his tendency to cherry-pick bad actors as examples of that group. So why does he keep make the same case again and again?

In part, it’s because he’s facing one of the hardest fights of his political career.  His campaign pledge to build a wall on Mexico’s dime was brilliant at the time.  But Fox, and the conservative media that he consumes never forgot about his promise about the Wall.  He has obviously decided to wield the levers of presidential power to make the promise of a “Wall” a reality.  He has chosen to take a hard stand on the issue that, probably more than any other item from his campaign, he is picking a fight over something that he himself has since made politically toxic.  With someone like Pelosi in power in the House, he is realizing that he may in fact, lack the clout to force his opponents' hand.

So, he reverts to his original political strategy.  It worked in the primaries, right!  It worked in the general election, just barely.  Everyone said it wouldn’t work then, and they were wrong, so why won’t it work now? The short answer, of course, is that everything else about the playing field has changed. The long answer is that it worked in 2016 thanks only to a number of other very lucky breaks.

As we kept our eyes on all of the misleading statistics in Trump’s Oval Office speech, this Wall item was his #1 original false claim, and one from which Trump now knows that he can’t back down.

It’s worth remembering something else about that 2016 race and about Trump’s entry into it.  Initially, the media was going after Trump over his controversial comments.  But when he won the nomination, his controversial decisions started gaining national media attention and Fox and Rush Limbaugh brought all of his hard-line immigration comments to very broad attention.

But that boost from the conservative media has now put Donald Trump into a “put up or shut up” position about the Wall. 

It will be interesting to see who will win in this great “Trump Border Wall” contest…?

Copyright G. Ater 2019