Trump conceded last year … that a wall or barrier is not the most effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration…. But he told lawmakers that his supporters want a wall and that he has to deliver it. Trump talked about the loud cheers the wall brought at rallies.
— The Washington Post
There you have it. All the detentions, all the suffering, all the deportations and all that money only so Trump can indulge his venomous base and retain their uninformed votes.
And here was a nice touch: "The height of the structure will vary between 18 and 30 feet, high enough to inflict severe injury or death from a fall."
Death. Serves them right for having attempted a misdemeanor.
You know the rest, unless you slept through yesterday: Trump promised pardons to aides who, on his orders, must break various laws so that an "[in]effective mechanism to curb illegal immigration" can be hailed at rallies by a presidential sociopath. He's also set on the forcible use of eminent domain, of late a GOP-detested abuse of government power.
The good news is that neither he nor we will ever see his enchanted wall. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has erected not one inch of the 500-mile, now-nonexistent fencing the president guaranteed his voters. And now he's left with an impossible 14 months to see that it's done.
Not that Trump and his nominally pre-pardoned subordinates won't give it the old criminal try. As a senior Border Patrol official summarized the administration and its project:
"They don’t care how much money is spent, whether landowners’ rights are violated, whether the environment is damaged, the law, the regs or even prudent business practices."