the "wall has become a symbol of a kind of rolling cultural & demographic extinction event"

The real national emergency is the threat of Trump’s collapse

But if you read between the lines of all the coverage, it is overwhelmingly clear that the real national emergency that Trump and his allies have discerned is an emergency that threatens him.

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But Trump’s public case for the wall has collapsed entirely, and much of the rest of the political system has rejected it, boxing him into a political corner with no escape. That’s the emergency. The formal declaration of a national emergency, allowing him a shot at building it unilaterally, might end up being the only way of bailing out the wall — and with it, bailing out himself.

We know all of this to be the case, because the basic facts are all out there confirming it, but it’s all so saturated in madness and bad faith that we grope for ways to convey it faithfully. The big story, which is everywhere for all to see, is that Trump and his advisers cannot justify the wall as Trump envisions it in any remotely credible way; that this is becoming harder to mask with lies; and that for Trump Nation, this really is an emergency.

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Trump’s national emergency and the ‘Calamity Thesis’

The wall’s “symbolic power” to Trump’s “core voters” is key to why Trump keeps insisting on it. But the corollary to this is that the collapsing case for it — and the possibility that it might not get built — is itself an emergency of sorts. You can’t watch Fox News without grasping the force of this looming threat:

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Whether this is why Trump won is beside the point. Trump did campaign endlessly on the invocation of existential threats of all kinds. For untold numbers in Trump’s base, particularly white evangelical Christians, the need for a wall has become a symbol of a kind of rolling cultural and demographic extinction event and of Trump’s ability to defend them from it. However many people do or do not believe this, Trump plainly thinks there are a lot of them out there.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/08/real-national-emergency-is-threat-trumps-collapse/?utm_term=.913ba3233317