But we should not kid ourselves. If President Trump were to resign, the future President Pence would face just as much outrage and resistance from the left.
.. The man shoots himself in the foot on a near daily basis and, in the process, scuttles his agenda. If he is not going to listen and concurrently is going to decide he is the only voice that matters, the only expert in the room, and the only person who can defend his record in a job he admits is harder than he thought, no one should give him the benefit of the doubt any longer.
.. But the status quo of the Trump administration is going to do more long-term harm than good. He is going to enable and create a resurgent, combative Democratic Party that will undermine everything he has done and usher in impeachment hearings. He risks not just a loss of the House, but a loss of Republican seats orders of magnitude greater than the Democrats lost under Barack Obama.
.. President Trump beat Hillary Clinton, he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and now he risks everything else.
- There will be no wall.
- There will be no Obamacare repeal.
- There will probably not even be substantive tax reform.
‘We’re Losing on the Central Promise of Trump’s Campaign.’
Planning for the wall should have begun on Nov. 9, and a spade should have been put into the earth to begin building it the day after Trump’s inauguration. Now, it’s 100 days later, and we still don’t have the whisper of a prospect of a wall.
Moreover, this isn’t one random bill funding Planned Parenthood (which this bill does). This is the budget deal. There won’t be another one like it until next October.
.. It’s theoretically possible that Trump could still build a wall, but he’s just massively lengthened the odds of ever prevailing. Sure, you can let the other team build a 20-point lead in first half and still come back to beat them, but it’s a lot easier if you don’t go into halftime 20 points down.
… Remember? There would be so much winning, we were going to get “sick and tired of winning,” and beg him, “Please, please, we can’t win anymore. … It’s too much. It’s not fair to everybody else.”
We’re not winning. We’re losing, and we’re losing on the central promise of Trump’s campaign.
Border Lawmakers Balk at Donald Trump’s Wall Request
No House or Senate members from the region express support for the funding proposal
Not a single member of Congress who represents the territory on the southwest border said they support President Donald Trump’s request for $1.4 billion to begin construction of his promised wall, according to a Wall Street Journal survey.. That includes nine members of the House and eight senators across four states: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California... Many Republicans responded that the Trump approach is overly focused on a physical barrier rather than other approaches to border security, such as technology, that experts say can be more effective and less expensive... in an interview, she said walls do little to stop criminal organizations from getting across the border. “They will go over, through or under physical barriers, sometimes pretty quickly,” she said... Mr. Hurd, whose district includes 800 miles along the border, describes a wall as “the most expensive and least effective way to secure the border.”.. “The idea of a wall sounds good as campaign rhetoric, but the campaign is over and we need to offer the American people real solutions, not a false sense of security,” Mr. Gonzalez said.
Sorry, Trump voters, you got scammed. You’re never going to get your wall.
It is simply impossible to overstate the symbolic importance both the wall and the idea that Mexico would pay for it had in 2016. Everything about Trump was embodied within it: the xenophobia, the vision of a world of threats and danger, the belief that complex problems have easy solutions, and most of all, the desire to stand tall and humiliate others, which was so critical to voters who felt beaten down and humiliated themselves. That’s why the preposterous notion that Mexico would pay for the wall was so critical: not because we need Mexico’s money, but because forcing it to pay would be an act of dominance, making it kneel before us, open up its wallets, and pay us for its own abasement.
.. Trump would tell his crowds, “The wall just got 10 feet higher!” And oh, would they cheer, thrilled beyond measure at the idea of punishing Mexico for its insolence and showing them who the boss is. Yes, the wall was about fear and hatred of immigrants, but more than anything it was a vision of empowerment.
.. He may also have realized that the wall is extremely unpopular, with polls consistently showing around 60 percent of Americans opposed to it, even if it remains popular with Trump’s base... the wall is more popular the farther you get from the border itself, which suggests that the people most unsettled by immigration aren’t those whose communities have the most immigrants, but those whose communities are incorporating significant numbers of immigrants for the first time... not a single member of the House or Senate who actually represents a border district or state .. supports building a wall... Every time they revisit the issue, the administration and Congress are going to confront the reality that a wall along the entire 2,000 miles of the border is utterly impractical, even if we were willing to pony up the money it would cost.. would require the use of eminent domain — which Republicans say they despise... The Department of Homeland Security already has a plan to build 100 miles worth of walls in some critical areas. That may well happen, along with other beefed-up border security efforts... Trump would regularly decree that the lobby of a building constituted floors 1-9 or 1-14, so he could claim that the building had more stories than it actually did. It didn’t fool anyone, but he kept doing it all the same.