Trump Never Had to Build a Wall

The border wall is Trump University. It’s Trump Steaks and Trump Vodka, too. It’s the futile promise of a fruitful career in the Trump Organization if you’ve earned his favor on a game show, or the assurance of fortunes once you buy that book that he didn’t write and likely never read himself. The wall is a con. And like practically everything else at the foundation of his empire, Trump always lied about who was going to pay for it.

Those of us intimately familiar with the structures already built inside our borders to oppress brown and black people knew that it didn’t matter whether or not the wall was a “metaphor,” as Lindsey Graham put it last Sunday.

Jerry Falwell, Jr., the Liberty University president, told the Washington Post this week that there is nothing Trump could do to endanger his support from the evangelical community and that “I can’t imagine him doing anything that’s not good for the country.” I presume “anything” includes a partial government shutdown over a border wall that Trump said Mexico was going to pay for but alas, there was no follow-up.

The sycophancy of supporters like Falwell, Jr., is why Trump never needed to try this hard to get the wall built. He may not have needed to even attempt to follow through on it. Were he wiser, he would have continued to use the wall as a political McGuffin: the unobtainable, unknowable object that he continued to dangle in front of his supporters until he won his second term. Now, as Democrats take over the House of Representatives today, Trump is behaving as though he lacks bladder control. Inadvertently, he has handed Democrats a unique opportunity. Not to put too fine a point on it, but preventing the construction of Trump’s border wall is a chance to defeat an actual, literal example of structural racism.

Democrats need to both defeat the wall and use this as a teachable moment for the country. Other forms of institutional bigotry are much less obvious, and therefore more easily ignored or equivocated. Betsy DeVos reversed the Obama guidance aimed at reducing racial disparities in school discipline, for one. Right before Christmas, we learned that Ben Carson has been pulling back Housing and Urban Development investigations into systemic patterns of segregation, choosing instead a more regressive path: focusing on individual cases brought to the department’s attention. On Thursday, the Post reported that a more sweeping rollback of “disparate impact” regulations is under consideration. A border wall, even a mythical one, is easier than housing discrimination for some Americans to envision.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/will-trump-build-wall-774514/