Let’s forget, for the moment, about whether a border wall between the United States and Mexico would be good or bad. Politically, Donald Trump needs it. No promise gained him more enthusiasm during the primaries. Three quarters of Republicans support it. And his base demands it. In a column written immediately after Trump’s election in November, Ann Coulter laid out a hundred-line daily schedule for Trump’s first hundred days that read, “Day 1: Start building the wall. Day 2: Continue building the wall. Day 3: Continue building the wall. Day 4: Continue building the wall,” and continued in this vein until Day 100, which read, “Report to American people about progress of wall. Keep building the wall.”
By the same token, considering politics alone, Democrats must stop the wall. Thwart Trump and he looks weak. You force him to break his signature promise. His agenda stalls. The Hispanic vote moves even more solidly to the left. The Democratic base gets energized, and Trump’s base gets demoralized and stays home in the next couple of elections. It’s cost-free. That’s why Chuck Schumer has spoken of “shutting down the government” if Trump tries to get the wall going.
But the war has been postponed. After initially vowing to insert a request for funding of the wall into a stopgap bill that has to pass this April to avoid a government shutdown, Trump has now backed off. Sean Spicer says Trump’s “priorities have not changed,” but the wall does not seem to be among them for the time being. People are now suggesting Trump has given up on the wall in all but rhetoric. And this would be momentous. If Trump’s wall is dead, then Trump’s presidency is dead. Has it come to this?
There are reasons to think so. Getting anything done in Washington is hard. (Look at how little tax law has changed since 1986.) Getting anything done with a determined minority standing in the way is even harder. (Look at all the thwarted laws on immigration and guns.) Getting anything done with a majority standing in the way is well-nigh impossible. Democrats uniformly oppose construction of the wall, and many Republicans quietly oppose it, too. Senator Lindsey Graham is already speaking of the wall as a metaphor and “code word for better border security,” as if he were a theologian and Trump’s words the Book of Genesis.
American voters can sometimes force Washington to resist its political donors. The financial bailouts of 2008 initially failed in the House. But Trump’s border fence, or wall, is opposed not only by donors but also 66 percent of voters, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll. As he approaches his 100th day, Trump lacks public support, momentum, and, at this point, clout.
This isn’t shocking. We all know that business people rarely have a smooth transition to politics. In government, you often have to keep dealing with the same negotiating partners, even if you hate them. You can’t walk away from a budget deal, because the government shuts down if you do. You can issue an order, but the civil service doesn’t necessarily follow it. You can ask your party to line up behind you, but it might not. Judges can stand in your way. The press can stand in your way. Countless enemies can stand in your way.
The hope for Trump among his supporters was that he’d be the exception. He was a billionaire salesman who seemed to keep winning even when he did things that seemed certain to make him lose. Perhaps, went the thinking, Trump had such keen intuition about power and persuasion that he’d upend the rules as much in office as he had on the campaign trail. Perhaps the buffoonery would go hand in hand with a knack for deal-making and a mysterious idiot-savant ability to get his way. But—no. When Trump looks as though he’s flailing, then, yes, he’s flailing.
So Trump’s options are limited. He could in theory play—or have played—a ruthless game to get his way, since Trump has the power to revoke the “deferred action for childhood arrivals” or DACA order that Barack Obama signed in order to shield those who have arrived here illegally as children. An icier type wouldn’t have hesitated to hold the fate of these people hostage for wall funding, employing rhetoric about the importance of tying today’s forgiveness to tomorrow’s prevention, and so on. But Trump shows few signs of being that callous, and he has conveyed only reassurances to the Dreamers. So threats of this sort will not be his approach.
The second option would be to try to sell the wall—and do a better job of it than he did with Ryancare. Oddly, Trump has never tried this route, and all of his speeches about preventing illegal immigration have been, for the most part, negative, focused on threats. For Americans who aren’t alarmed—and that’s most Americans, since immigrants here illegally are rarely, as human beings, scary—that’s not going to be persuasive. Trump could try to sell people on a vision of America with tighter labor markets, more equitable distribution of wealth, and less balkanization. (These are things that even liberals can support.) He could pair this with a pitch for the wall, arguing that walls are peaceful and usually effective, and they reduce the need for more intrusive forms of enforcement such as workplace raids and deportation. But Trump has only figured out how to use the wall to sell himself. He never figured out how to use himself to sell the wall.
What all parties can at least celebrate is that Trump looks less and less like a despotic madman. Most dictators and would-be dictators are ideologues who reveal an obvious insouciance toward human life, not just in actions but in rhetoric, with words like “sacrifice” and “struggle” and “immortal” making regular appearances. Trump seems, if anything, sobered by the gravity of his new role. As he told the Associated Press in an interview much derided for its typically Trumpian mishmash of thoughts and words, “in business, you don’t necessarily need heart, whereas here, almost everything affects people.” That might not be the language of a Lincoln, but it’s also not the language of a Mussolini. So far, the fatal flaws in Trump’s presidency seem to spring from equivocation and cluelessness. Hey: it’s better than fanaticism and skill.
