WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress never really wanted to build the wall. It wasn’t a priority like tax cuts, which are a raison d’être of…
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republicans in Congress never really wanted to build the wall.
It wasn’t a priority like tax cuts, which are a raison d’être of Republican domestic policy. And it wasn’t their own campaign pledge to voters, like the vow to repeal and replace Obamacare that became hard to keep.
President Donald Trump’s signature campaign rally cry — “Build the Wall!” — was always more of a slogan than a policy. A “metaphor,” Republicans have called it — shorthand for the more complicated trade-offs that would be required for an immigration-and-border security deal. A “MacGuffin,” as one former top GOP aide put it Tuesday, only there to motivate action — in Trump’s case, for support.
That’s why funding the wall languished when Republicans controlled Congress, and why they now appear willing to take far less than the $5.7 billion Trump demanded in a deal with Democrats to prevent another partial government shutdown.
Alfonso Aguilar, a Department of Homeland Security official in the George W. Bush administration, said Trump’s wall became so “toxic” it drove away support. Even routine funding for border barriers and fences that have anchored security policy for more than a decade — some 700 miles already being built- became off limits.
“The problem is the president only talks about the big, beautiful wall,” said Aguilar, the president of the Latino Partnership for Conservative Principles.
And for Trump, he said, that quickly becomes a launching point to rail against drug smugglers and human traffickers in caravans at the border, though it’s clear that the vast majority of immigrants trying to enter the country illegally are not such criminals.
