Trump's wall is about ego and having a politically efficacious talking point, not border security

Trump has been repining about his wall for, what, three years now. Why? Because it's politically expedient for him to do so, for among his benighted base, it's galvanizing and because for him it's a matter of ego, looking tough. He said he'd build a beautiful wall; laughable as it was, he referenced his experience in real estate as a basis for his knowing how to build a wall; he said Mexico would pay for his wall; and he led stadium-sized throngs of nitwits (they lacked the sense to know it wasn't doable "from jump") in "build the wall" and "Mexico's going to pay for it" chants.

How do we know that the wall is about politics, about having a rallying/talking point, and that increasing border security is sought not seminally but only ostensibly?

• Because at the start of the year, Trump turned down a chance to get $25 billion for his border wall and he later lobbied against a bill providing deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants and $25 billion in border wall funding because he wanted cuts to legal immigration as well.
  • Jan. 2018 --> How Democrats Stopped Worrying and Learned to Accept Trump's Wall
  • Feb 15, 2018 --> Senate rejects bill offering $25B for wall

That was two $25B opportunities to get Trump his wall in less than a month and Trump/Congressional Republicans abjured both. Why did they reject the bills? Because to get the $25, Trump/GOP-ers had to agree to a path to citizenship for the ~700K DACA people....As if those folks had anything to do with wall's imagined or realizable border security returns....They're already here. No wall isn't going to stop them from entering the US.​

• Because illegal immigration has been declining steadily for about a decade and even the CBP's data shows so.
  • in 2017, border arrests had dropped to a historic low; to find a year with fewer border arrests, you have to go back all the way to 1971.
  • September 2017 DHS report noted that “the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before.”
  • Border Crossings Have Been Declining for Years, Despite Claims of a ‘Crisis of Illegal Immigration’
  • Is the US in an 'illegal' immigration crisis? Border patrol data suggests otherwise
• Because nobody who wants the wall has presented a methodologically sound economic case showing the wall is "worth it." How can one show the wall is economically worth it? Three steps:
  1. Show that southern-border illegal immigrants' demand function is (has been and will remain) quadratic or higher order and that:
     - if quadratic, the minimum has been reached and can only be maintained by installing a wall
     - if cubic or higher order, a local minimum has been reached and the curve minimum cannot be reached without the wall
  2. Show that (A) the net economic impact (gains less costs) of installing and maintaining the wall bests (B) the net economic impact of not installing and maintaining the wall. (FWIW, the CIS has already calculated B.)
  3. Produce a sound quantitative methodology for measuring the post installation realized net economic impact of installing the wall.
• Because the Trump Administration was offered $1.6B for border security and won't accept it.

 

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Of course it's a crock of. No big expensive national wall has ever done what it was built for.
Has nobody asked why the Trump Foundation doesn't just donate the wall and make the steel slat industry great again?

 

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No surprises then, that Trump's rabid base don't actually give a shit if a wall gets built.

What they seem to care about is having someone like Trump as president, so they can all agree he's doing a "fantastic" job getting a non-existent, not-being-built-anytime-soon wall built (he promised!).
Because he's really some kind of magician, a superman, an alien from outer space here to save America from . . . whatever it is America needs to be saved from.

Maybe it's all the non-Americans, maybe it's the Russkies (nah . . .) maybe it's the Liberals. It's just gotta be something.

 

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It can't. It's been dissolved, the money has been handed to a judge for distribution to legitimate charities.

Meanwhile, recent (past few years) stiffer security on the border seems to have been a primary factor in the increase of illegal permanent residents of the US. What used to be a regular cycling of seasonal and temporary laborers in both directions has been made much more dangerous and onerous in the northern direction (for the legal and illegal both), and so those successful are more highly motivated to remain rather than risk another attempt.

In remaining past the usual terms of their employment, they of course exacerbate whatever negative effects illegal immigration has: competing for permanent jobs, making fuller use of infrastructure and community services, establishing dark economies and off-book transaction protocols, undermining legal and governmental management of American communities.

 

He can always fake a new one. Only, the name's been used and he couldn't bear to call it anything else. Poser, that.

 

I am becoming increasingly less concerned about what Trump thinks. Megalomaniacs will always have grand dreams.

What alarms me is that, once he's gone, there will still be millions of Americans that think this way.

Presidents will come and go, but my fear lies in the disappearance of a restoring force toward sanity.

 

Been eroding since 1980.
The Republican Party must be destroyed.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10133950-carthage-must-be-destroyed

 

Yeah. Funny, back during the Bush era, I'd thought I was seeing the End of Days.
Bush was Gandhi compared to Trump.

 

if he starts to build it(he will never finish building it AND it will never be finished)

it will be his mount rushmore of failure to the American people
sitting there for ever showing how much he failed for generations to come

wont happen


why are there not drones simply flying the border continuously ?
it would be much cheaper. non invasive to farmers who have land that is on both sides of the border and towns that make their money off being on the border.
farmers could purchase membership contracts for land management off the drone company to keep monitoring soil and pasture, tracking stock etc...
tracking crop dusting effectiveness and live tracking reducing wasted fertilizer and reducing river and water table pollution etc etc...
wild life tracking
endangered species tracking etc etc etc...
doesn't mean much to concrete city living self indulgent industrialists

 

Drones don't stop people.

 

I think it's pretty much destroyed itself by falling in line behind this grotesquerie. At least, nationally.
Of course, at the state level, they still carry big sticks and big money-bags.
But even they have lost their sane and intelligent members over the last 30 years; how competent can be they be?

 

Prior to 2015, Trump could have said and done pretty much anything and it wouldn't have obtained my notice unless he did it right in front of me; however, these days, I cannot be quite so insouciant about what Trump says/does because he's POTUS. Indeed, his friggin' tweets are understood as official statements:
"the government [treats] the President’s statements ... – whether by tweet, speech or interview – as official statements of the President of the United States."

 

You may be forgetting what W&Cheney was like. A veil of amnesia has been drawn over those years, by pretty much the entire body of "respectable" venues of public discussion.
W was very, very bad.

Just a quick, one-off reminder: the torture program run by US, including the establishment of purpose built black site torture facilities (shackle points and hanging hooks installed, specialty electronic gear wired in, isolated manipulation of temperature and lighting and sound built in, trained dogs and "interrogators" made available, and of course specialty cleanup and sanitation fixtures provided) was overseen by W, Cheney, and several members of the Cabinet. They were present, via live video and phone links, during some of the torture sessions.

Here's another: W installed political overseers in dozens of scientifically oriented Federal agencies, to make sure all scientific research and management - as well as all communication with the public - was aligned with his administration's policies and political agenda. These overseers were scientifically incompetent, for the most part - they were Republican Party loyalists.

Not that Trump isn't worse. Just that the comparison is not dramatic or highlighted. W and Trump are not different categories or kinds of administrator - they differ in personal style, mostly.

 

They don't have to be competent. Reagan wasn't competent.

 

Reagan wasn't competent himself, but didn't need to be. He was still surrounded by people who could get things done - even bad things. But people who know how to do things are perceived as a threat or rival by people who desire power but have no skills themselves. They require staff "Whose thinking in more in line with their own" (i.e. stone ignorant yes-men). If they also keep laying off civil servants...
...who's minding the store?

 

I do remember wishing that Bush could have been charged with war crimes over the bait & switch attack on Iraq, using WMDs as a justification in the wake of 9/11.

 

They didn't get any governance done. They were incompetent at governing - complete screwups. (The Soviet Union's collapse goes down as one of the colossal blown opportunities of American history - we ended up with Putin, for chrissake.) And that was Reagan's fault - his responsibility to prevent.

Reagan was not an incompetent speaker, or actor (a B range at worst), or spokesman. He just didn't know what he was doing as a Governor or President. He didn't know how to tell GE to pay its taxes and leave governance to the wise - or at least to those with longer horizons than the quarterly report. He didn't know how crippling a mental frame WASP supremacy had bequeathed him. He and his never noticed the K Street lobbying boom during his tenure, or the behavior of the newly deregulated S&Ls. He couldn't tell a patriot from Oliver North. He had the US government smuggling cocaine for crack into the urban centers of the US, to finance rightwing terrorism in Central America - a lose/lose gambit for the US if ever there was one, a goddam disaster as it played out - plausibly on the scale of the Iraq War, even.

Trump is a continuation, not a break, not a new thing, not a sudden departure from formerly sane Republican politics. The Party of 1994 Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich, of 2000 Cheney and 2008 Palin, did not take a sudden and dramatic leap into new waters when it nominated Trump for President in 2016.

Same old same old GOP, Party of 'trees pollute more than cars', 'welfare queens driving their Cadillacs to buy cigarettes', 'tax cuts will pay for themselves', 'Nicaraguan communists are only a few days from the California border', Reagan. Trump said "caravan" instead of "communist" - not a dramatic change even in the rhetoric.

 

And yet somehow, "W" managed not to get cozy with our adversaries and he managed not to make our allies wonder whether he could be trusted with their intelligence information or whether he'd engage them in a trade war of sorts.

 

He was competent enough to know what he wasn't competent about and to heed the input of people who truly are competent in "this or that."

 

I was pissed about that too, but, you know what, I wasn't ever worried that Bush (or any other prior POTUS) would literally destroy the country.