If you somehow weren’t around for any of the 2016 presidential campaign, you missed the point when Donald Trump decided he wanted to build a wall on the Mexican border so no immigrants could get into the country. He then harped on that idea for months on end, even convincing himself (and pretty much nobody else) that Mexico would be paying for said wall. John Oliver even broke down the immense cost of such a project and the unlikeliness of anyone wanting to cough up that kind of dough, whether it’s the United States or some other country that starts with an “M” and ends with “-exico.”
But now, Trump and his team have reportedly signaled to the GOP that he will ask Congress to fund the huge project this Spring by adding the necessary funding to the upcoming spending bill that needs to be voted on by April 28th. It would not only break a campaign promise to make Mexico pay for it but potentially cost the US billions of dollars and even threaten a government shutdown in a few months. Of course, the alternative to Congress or Mexico paying seems to be that Trump would push to go to war with Mexico and make them cough up the necessary funding. Near the end of his campaign, Trump did walk back the idea of a lengthy border wall a bit, but that was also probably more because of his team’s need that he stop alienating people and get to the White House rather than him actually changing his mind about the plan.
Republican representatives are declining to comment on the status of such a request but Rep. Steve Scalise (R-LA) says of the idea,
“We want President Trump to have all the tools he needs to build the wall. We’re in talks with him on the details of it as they’re still putting together their team. We still got a few months before there’s another funding bill that’s going to move. We’re going to work with him to make sure we can get it done. We want to build a wall. He wants to build a wall.”
That doesn’t sound like a representative who is overjoyed about the idea of needing to fight the Democratic party on a spending bill that was already going to be contentious, and may now be unimaginably hard to agree on because of Trump’s desires. But Republicans have surprised us before so maybe they want to build the wall, and maybe they told Trump they want to build a border wall but actually meant a Boarder Wall that is really just big wall in the backyard of the White House covered in paintings of Boarder Collies.
(via KTLA)