Logan Ramsey
Editor-in-Chief
Earlier in the semester I wrote that President Trump would lose the border wall fight. In light of his declaration of a national emergency at the southern border, I still think that’s the case, but it also doesn’t matter anymore if he builds the wall or not.
The president knows that this declaration is going to meet a myriad of legal challenges. He said as much when he made the announcement from the Rose Garden.
The thing is that he doesn’t care about that, even if he loses all the way to the Supreme Court. That’s because the wall doesn’t even have to get built for him to win.
This move is political theater, and the audience of this play is swing voters and Trump’s base. Trump has to show voters that he’s doing everything he can do to get the wall built, and if he fails, then it’s the Democrats’ fault.
I still stand by my earlier opinion that the wall will never be built.
The estimated cost of the entire wall stretching from sea to shining sea is $23 billion, and after Trump literally brought the government to a standstill and overreached his executive powers, he raised a measly $8 billion. That’s okay for him, because the southern border crisis is entirely fictional.
I think a good indication of this was right before the 2018 midterm elections. You may recall the president warned of an “invasion” of tired, hungry migrants fleeing persecution from their home countries in Central America.
This was at the forefront of the news in the coming days before the midterms, and once they were finished, the story was dropped. It was another example of political theater. The Republicans needed a crisis to get their voters to the polls.
In Trump’s first year of office, there was the lowest number of migrants coming to the country since 1971. The majority of illegal immigrants are people who overstay their work visas after they expire.
The story behind the southern border crisis completely ignores those statistics.
While drugs and sex slaves get smuggled across the border, there is no evidence of it causing a national emergency, but let’s entertain the thought for a moment that there was. Even then, what the president has done about immigration doesn’t address those issues.
Think back to one of the most reported stories of this summer, when the Trump administration began to separate families at the southern border. The children who were being locked in cages weren’t being separated from their drug trafficker parents — their parents were asylum seekers.
The most misunderstood point about that entire story is that asylum seekers crossing the border are not illegal according to international and federal law. But that doesn’t matter to the Trump administration and parts of the GOP.
The border wall was never about illegal immigration, it’s always been about immigration.
Trump isn’t stupid. He knows exactly what he’s doing, and he knows how to trick his base.
No matter what happens now, the president will win. He’s already put forth a great effort, and that’s all he needs to do for his base voters.
He knows they’ll blame the Democrats or a bad ruling by the Supreme Court for why the wall didn’t get built. It really doesn’t matter who they’ll blame. I just know they’ll blame someone other than Trump.
Now it’s become a matter of what’s the least worst option for the country, and right now that’s the Supreme Court striking down his declaration. He still wins to his base, but he doesn’t get his wall.
But if the Supreme Court votes in Trump’s favor, which he’s counting on, the state of the country will be in hot water. Trump will have gained a major political victory that would speak highly to voters going into the 2020 election.
There’s a lot of well-qualified Democrats running for president in 2020, but political victories speak louder to voters than words do. I’m not convinced any of them can compete with a win like that.
