There's no post-Christmas gift quite like an above-the-fold gift that further exposes the cruelty, stupidity, and pseudoconservative heterodoxy of the authoritarian Trump regime — especially when the regime's miasmic perversity settles at the unwelcome feet of its supporters.
"The list of challenges still facing Mr. Trump’s 'big, beautiful' wall include an investigation into construction contracts" — shocking, no? — "funding delays and a recent legal decision blocking emergency access to Defense Department funds to build it," reports the NY Times. "But access to private land … may be the tallest barrier standing between the president and his wall."
Along the Texas-Rio Grande border, nearly all of that private land belongs to diehard Trumpers, who nevertheless find the president's pointless theft of their property a trifle unsettling. As expressed in White House meetings, Trump's sophisticated understanding of eminent domain is simply to "take the land" from its owners, for purely political reasons.
To his hapless supporters nationwide he has promised 450 miles of new wall, and by God, useless as the wall may be, he's going to have it.
Or is he? To date, only 93 miles of it have been built, and most of that has been on federal land that Trump needn't have bothered to steal. Of the total miles — again, 450 — required, 162 of them are to pass through Southern Texas Trump Country, of which 144 miles are owned by said diehard, yet unsettled, Trumpers.
And of the already utterly obsolete shebang of a new wall spanning all that privately owned land? "The Trump administration," writes the Times, "has acquired just three miles since 2017."
That means not, however, that the regime has in any way slowed the rapacious pace of its courtroom exercise of eminent domain — that once perfectly execrable abuse of government power, according to old-school luminaries of the conservative faith.
A mere three miles it may be for now; yet throughout the election year, many more will be confiscated from Trumpers by Trump himself. In court, landowners possess the right to squeal and whine, but virtually nothing more than that.
Here's the real kicker, though: Even after successfully stealing X amount of privately owned land, Trump will still be stymied in his political obsession by bleedingly obviously corrupt construction-contract investigations as well as legal and congressional delays in wall funding.
In brief, Trump's farthest down-South supporters are being slapped in the face for much ado about nothing.