By Scott Shurtleff
The insistence on building Trump’s wall is based on the silly canard that Mexicans don’t have ladders. The idea of a person conquering a $20 billion structure using a $20 apparatus is both comical and humiliating. There are also several other ways to circumnavigate an unwatched wall. Tunnels are easy enough to build. Passageways can be cut into any known materials, using the simplest of common tools. Drones fly over and boats go around.
So, when data-ignoring writers like Ann Coulter use baseless mathematical formulas to promote the false need for the wall, I become inspired to delve deeper into their/her catalog of justifications. At this point though, the wall has become little more than a trope for xenophobia and a concrete symbol for white nationalism.
Coulter is dismayed at President Trump’s recent capitulation to Democrats on the sensitive issue of immigration. She, like many of his supporters, feels betrayed by the slow progress of the physical wall and by Trump’s oscillation on DACA. Her disappointment is a sense of glee to a great many people; mostly because the only wall being built is the one dividing the Republican party.
Although she makes no mention of the wall in her latest posting from January 11, Coulter’s unambiguous disdain for foreigners keeps her fanbase loyal and attentive. She is, if nothing else, consistent in her controversial viewpoints. And Trump’s betrayal of that has Coulter running into the arms of like-minded, disgraced former Trumpion, Steve Bannon.
“In order to prove he doesn’t have dementia, as alleged in a recent book, President Trump called a meeting with congressional leaders on Tuesday — and requested that it be televised.
He then proceeded to completely sell out the base and actually added to his problems by appearing senile.” She wrote in an article she titled, ‘It Turns Out Bannon Was Trump’s Brain.’
But, whatever accounts for Coulter’s staunchness and Trump’s capriciousness, no evidence supports either the need for, or the effectiveness of such a wall. Former Secretary of Labor during the Clinton administration, Robert Reich, summarized the idiocy in his web article from January 2017. He mentions, among other things, that the wall is not even necessary, as undocumented immigration has been in steady decline since 2008. And, these illegal entrants don’t “steal” jobs from Americans, nor do they commit more crimes than U.S. citizens.
Lifelong Republican John Dean calls the project, “Impractical, impolitic, impossible.” Even as Trump himself seems to have softened—at least for today—his rigidity on the matter, his base will not be swayed…by facts or cost or pragmatism. Coulter is the mouthpiece for this movement and if she won’t acquiesce an iota, then neither will her followers. And if the rift between she and Trump continues to grow as a result, then that is a victory for decency.
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