by Joe Walsh
“There’s no way, in my view as (Department of Homeland Security) secretary—and I said this in all of my hearings—we don’t need a wall from sea to shining sea, as I said. The CBP, Customs and Border Protection people, who are so familiar with the border, they can tell you, you know, if you say, ‘I can get you 40 miles,’ they’ll tell you exactly where they want it. ‘I can get you 140 miles,’ they can tell you exactly where they want it. If I told them I can get you 2,000 miles, they’d say, ‘Eh, seems like an awful waste of money.’ ”—March 7, 2019, during an event at Duke University11
Now, here’s the thing about Kelly: He’s a retired four-star marine general who was commander, United States Southern Command—the U.S. defense command responsible for operations in Central and South America. The man knows what he’s talking about. In fact, that’s one of the reasons Trump nominated him to lead DHS: “Trump’s team was drawn to him because of his Southwest border expertise,” the Washington Post reported.12 There was no questioning his credibility as a tough guy, either; immigration hawks praised his selection,13 so if John Kelly says that simply building a wall can’t be an adequate response to our immigration issue . . . then maybe Trump hasn’t taken the issue as seriously and as thoughtfully as he should have.
And make no mistake about it—he hasn’t. He’s never really given a damn about the full range of immigration reform.
If he had, it would have been the first thing he moved on after he was inaugurated. It was, after all, the one subject in the context of “government policy” that defined his run for president and arguably got him elected. More than any other, it was the issue that his base and my radio listeners cared about. And the best he could do was demagogue it by shouting and tweeting “wall, wall, wall” over and over and doing little more, while watching Republicans light themselves on fire in a doomed effort to repeal Obamacare.
If he had really ever cared about seeing the wall across the finish line—getting it designed, getting it funded, getting it built—we would’ve seen some serious progress in the last few years, especially in the first two, when his party controlled both the House and the Senate. There would have been no one for Trump to blame but himself and his fellow Republicans. Instead, any progress has been negligible, particularly if you compare it to the overhaul he promised his voters. What we’ve gotten in return for casting ballots for him is:
$341 million in May 2017 “to replace approximately 40 miles of existing primary pedestrian and vehicle border fencing along the southwest border using previously deployed and operationally effective designs, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety; and to add gates to existing barriers”14
$1.34 billion in March 2018 for “fencing” that uses “operationally effective designs deployed as of [May 2017], such as currently deployed steel bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety”15
$1.38 billion in February 2019 “for the construction of primary pedestrian fencing, including levee pedestrian fencing, in the Rio Grande Valley Sector . . . available for operationally effective designs deployed as of [May 2017], such as currently deployed steel bollard designs, that prioritize agent safety”16
That’s the extent of Trump’s work with Congress: about $3 billion, not for wall but for fence, much of it just to take the place of what was already there, on a project that Customs and Border Protection said they’d need $18 billion to complete17 and that a bill from House minority leader Kevin McCarthy pegged at $25 billion total.18
Quite the negotiator is The Donald.
What makes this choke job even louder is that he reportedly squandered an opportunity to get the full $25 billion in talks with Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer in January 2018.19 Make what you will of getting the money in exchange for making the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program law, as the deal would’ve done, but Trump blew it so badly that he didn’t get a penny after the Democrats’ top negotiator approached him. (Senator John Cornyn, the Republicans’ number two, said that Schumer had extended the offer; this wasn’t some nonexistent thing that the Democrats made up just to make Trump look bad.) All he got was the token funding in the spending legislation referenced above.
So naturally, we come to where this chapter began: I want the wall, but if I had to choose between (1) having a wall and having a king and (2) having no wall and having a president, I’d take no wall. Trump, who is president, chose to be a king. After failing to work successfully within the law, he sought to succeed by working outside the law. He declared a bunk “national emergency” on the southern border shortly after he signed the February 2019 spending bill, completely perverting the definition of “emergency” and going around Congress’s decision not to give him more funds for the wall than it had already provided. In announcing the emergency, he invoked a statute that allows presidents to move around money that Congress has appropriated for military construction. Some of the projects from which Trump took money include schools for children of active-duty parents, arms ranges, and warehouses for hazardous waste both in the United States and on military bases overseas, as NPR documented.20 Another is the rebuilding of the Camp Santiago National Guard training base in Puerto Rico, which was pummeled by Hurricane Maria in 2017.21 Think about this: we’ve gone from “Mexico is going to pay for the wall” to “Let’s take funding from our own military facilities damaged by a natural disaster to pay for the wall.”
To Congress’s credit, it didn’t stand for that. Both the House and the Senate—with the support of twenty-five Republican lawmakers combined—passed a resolution to strike down the emergency declaration. “Never before has a president asked for funding, Congress has not provided it, and the president then has used the National Emergencies Act of 1976 to spend the money anyway,” said Republican senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, referring to the law that Trump used for the authority to declare his cooked-up emergency.22 Trump vetoed the resolution, of course, but the declaration continues to be challenged: a Senate committee easily approved legislation in 2019 from Republican senator Mike Lee that would reform the national emergency statutes and end the one that Trump had declared,23 and a federal judge in Texas ruled against the declaration that October.24
You’d think this kind of widespread opposition, which transcends party, would humble the president a bit. You’d think. But this is Donald Trump we’re talking about. There’s not a chance of that. Not only has he broken the law himself in trying to get the wall built, but he’s asked others to break it for him. As I mentioned in a previous chapter, he’s told his subordinates he’d have their backs if they ran into trouble carrying out unlawful acts on his behalf. “When aides have suggested that some orders are illegal or unworkable, Trump has suggested he would pardon the officials if they would just go ahead, aides said. He has waved off worries about contracting procedures and the use of eminent domain, saying ‘take the land,’ according to officials who attended the meetings [about the wall]. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pardon you,’ he has told officials in meetings about the wall,” the Washington Post wrote in August 2019.25
That is what he has resorted to, to bring his demagoguery full circle. He’s said more than two hundred times that the wall is in the process of being built—even though, as I wrote above, Congress has approved money only for older fence designs that it previously sanctioned. That distinction is important for operational reasons, such as effectiveness, but also because the distinction was important to Trump—important enough that he couldn’t stop dreaming aloud about how tall and majestic and impenetrable and unprecedented was his vision for a border barrier. In September 2019, Customs and Border Protection told the Washington Post that “approximately 64 miles of new border-wall system in place of dilapidated designs” had been erected to date, far short of the 1,000 miles Trump once guaranteed and the 450 miles the administration said would be knocked out by the end of 2020.26 Yet Trump said as far back as February 2019 that “the chant now should be, ‘finish the wall’ as opp
osed to ‘build the wall,’ because we’re building a lot of wall.”27
Lies, lies everywhere. The story has gone from “The wall must be built and I need $25 billion to do it and I’ll get Mexico to pay for it” to “It’s being built and when I said Mexico would pay for it I didn’t actually mean they’d pay us for it and it’s paying for it in other ways, anyway.” Which is also a lie. Trump said in January 2019 that “Mexico is paying for the Wall through the new USMCA Trade Deal,”28 even though (1) that trade deal still hadn’t been ratified by Congress at the time of this writing, almost a year later, and (2) the deal doesn’t include tariffs on Mexican exporters or any levy that would net the United States new money from the Mexican government. (Lies, lies everywhere.) But never mind that, because the story continues. It continues to “The chant should be more like ‘finish the wall’ at this point, and it’s so awesome that ‘we’re building a wall in Colorado”—he literally said that, “we’re building a wall in Colorado”29 (don’t pay attention to this part in parentheses here, but it’s not actually a wall). He’s selling us a bunch of bullshit, everybody. Don’t buy it.
On immigration, Trump has pulled the double whammy of letting down conservatives both on policy outcomes and on the rule of law. For the policy outcomes, he promised a hundred times more than he could deliver, because he failed to think big picture like the vast majority of border hawks in his own party—people who said that a wall was a great beginning but certainly not the end of immigration reform. For the rule of law, he resorted to breaching the limits of the presidential office—typical for him—specifically because he failed to follow through on his promises: failed to be even a competent dealmaker with Congress when his party had the majority, much less the greatest dealmaker the world has ever known. So Trump is definitely not worth the trouble. He’s a conservative only for show. He has taken legitimate ideas on the right about a complex and sensitive issue such as immigration and demagogued them to hell and back, riffing on them so irresponsibly and prejudicially that he has delegitimized one side of the issue altogether. He provides negative returns on the public’s investment in him. And just as I believed it was best to cut my losses with him, I believe it’s best that you do, too, if you’re wondering about an exit strategy from his camp.
Afterword
Closing Thoughts
Let’s take a trip down memory lane, through the last thirty-plus years of our country’s presidential elections. In 1988, the matchup was George H. W. Bush versus Michael Dukakis; in 1992, it was Bush versus Bill Clinton; in 1996, it was Bob Dole versus Clinton; in 2000, it was Bush versus Al Gore; in 2004, it was Bush versus John Kerry; in 2008, it was John McCain versus Barack Obama; in 2012, it was Mitt Romney versus Obama; in 2016, it was Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton. Up to 2016, there weren’t any outliers in that list; you could go back for a while further and still not come across any. Sure, the Bushes and the Clintons were political dynasties, but the politics of each one of them were pretty normal between the center-right and the center-left. Dole, McCain, and Romney were mainstream Republicans, just as Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry were mainstream Democrats, even if it was up for debate just how conservative or just how liberal each one was. Obama provoked a political rebuke stronger than any of his recent predecessors had, of which I was a part. There might not be a major US political figure in my lifetime with whom I’ve disagreed more strongly than him. But he had a coherent, sane worldview, and I consider him a patriotic American.
Trump is the one person from this list who stands way, way apart from the rest. But it’s not because he was a businessman who had never held elected office—the kind of “outsider” that antiestablishment voters have long pined for to “shake up the system.” It’s because at no point in Trump’s life did he ever develop a basic understanding and appreciation for our form of government—for democracy. He has never been one to play by the rules. And when he took that instinct into a job requiring that he uphold the Constitution and the laws of the United States, which he neither understands nor cares about, our country almost seemed destined to take a tumultuous ride for the following few years. I didn’t foresee the scope of that possibility in 2016—but I sure as hell see it in the rearview mirror now.
His rise means one thing: for the first time in memory, Americans are not choosing between just a Republican and a Democrat. Both parties can scream about the threat the other poses to the country, but their warnings apply to government policy. Republicans worry about Democrats nationalizing medical insurance, just as Democrats worry about Republicans repealing Obamacare. They can each say that their opponents’ ideas are mortal threats to the United States—and as someone who comes from the world of talk radio, I grant that this kind of overstatement often doesn’t do the public’s mood any favors. But ultimately, this kind of disagreement is over legislation that Congress should pass. I side with the Republican point of view on most such issues. But those are not the issues that define Donald Trump.
Trump is defined not by his stance on health care reform but by his flagrant abuse of his office’s powers. He is defined not by his trade strategy but by his narcissism, which liberates him to behave however he damn well pleases. He is defined not by the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act but by his cult of personality, which resembles that of historical and contemporary authoritarians and even dictators. He is not part of the kind of binary choice that Americans are used to making between the two major parties. He is part of something much, much broader and history bending: a choice between a president and a wannabe tyrant, between democracy and despotism.
Look—I straight-up disagree with the Democratic Party about a lot of things. I’m troubled that its left flank, which makes economic promises that the government could never keep, is gaining so much influence in its ranks. I’m downright disturbed that two-thirds of American adults can’t accurately define socialism, per a YouGov survey from October 2019, and that 70 percent of millennials say they would vote for self-described socialists.1 This tells me that too much of the country doesn’t adequately appreciate the damage that socialism has done to people worldwide and so is okay with some idea of it at home. Even if that idea is unlikely to ever manifest as anything close to the real thing, a strong turn toward progressive government is enough for me to say, “Hell, no.”
But in these times, I have to ask myself: Where does the importance of this rank in comparison to the survival of our government? I’ve already stated that I’d rather have no border wall with Mexico if the trade-off is having a king instead of a president. What if the point of view were flipped, though? I can live with Washington failing to enact conservative policy, as frustrating as that outcome is. But what about Washington veering left? After all, avoiding that is one side of the bargain many Republicans felt they had to make in 2016: accept Trump if only to reject Hillary Clinton’s vision for the United States.
There are a few things I want to emphasize. One: Weighing almost the entirety of government policy against the health of that very government is an apples-to-apple-tree comparison. If the tree rots and dies, there are no apples left to pick—no wall to build, no trade deals to ratify, no taxes to cut. This applies even to the more existential problems facing the country, such as long-term federal debt reduction and climate change. Of course we need to address those at the same time as we work on repairing our nation’s democracy. But unless we have a stable, democratic form of government, we won’t be able to tackle those matters in the long run. Now, maybe some voters’ preference is that a president try to take care of these big things alone, since Congress stubbornly can’t or won’t act in a way that aligns with their viewpoint. Supporting Trump’s emergency declaration for the southern border is an example of such a preference in action. So is supporting Tom Steyer’s pledge to reform the nation’s climate agenda with executive orders. In these cases, Trump’s backers and Steyer’s backers may applaud their actions. That’s how it goes with a king sometimes: sometimes he’ll give you what you want, and you’ll cheer
.
But when he doesn’t, you’ll jeer—and you won’t have any recourse.
And when he behaves unbound by the rule of law altogether and unaccountable to the citizenry, you’ll be living not in a democracy but in the type of society the Founding Fathers fled so they and their successors would never have to endure anything like it again.
The second thing I want to emphasize is that Donald Trump is not a banner man for conservatism. It’s my opinion that conservatives’ strongest objection to him should be that he acts like a dictator. Go through the history of the presidency, and recall all the legitimate objections that we had to Trump’s predecessors behaving in such a fashion. Conservatives despise the legacy of Woodrow Wilson, and rightly so. We hold in contempt Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Supreme Court–packing scheme and unlawful internment of immigrants and nationals of Japanese, German, and Italian ancestry during World War II—something he authorized with an executive order. “WHEREAS the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities,” it began.2 You can trace this kind of paranoia all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts, which, although approved by Congress, carried with them a nativist sentiment away from which the United States has tried to evolve over the decades. It’s because of this exact history that conservatives’ antennae should be up during the time of Trump. We’ve been down these treacherous roads before. We shouldn’t have to travel down them ever again. If our value system truly places the Constitution and the law at the fore and is summed up by the aspirational words of our Founders that we claim to hold so dear, we have to reject Donald Trump wholesale. It’s not summed up just by that one sentence of the Declaration of Independence that we’re so familiar with: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” It’s the one that comes right after: “That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Trump exercises his powers unjustly and acts without Congress’s consent where it’s required—the Congress, made up of representatives the people choose to make laws on their behalf.