The Wall

There was never going to be a wall.

Even Trump, who in the early going was undoubtedly a true believer in an actual wall between the United States and Mexico, in all likelihood came to understand fairly quickly that a multi-billion-dollar sea-to-sea structure of dubious efficacy traversing mountains, rivers, and canyons by way of a decades long construction project was not a real thing. Even he understood, if his core supporters did not, that “the wall” was not to be taken literally and really was about a menu of upgraded security measures – some wall, some fence, some technology, some manpower – along the 2,000-mile U.S. – Mexico border.

Real or symbolic, however, the wall was always the centerpiece of Trumpism – the thing that drew millions to him and the perfect metaphor for why so many saw him as a savior: His core support came from, and still comes from, people who blame their disappointments and fears on everybody but themselves – Mexicans, blacks, Washington elites, the media, Jews, Muslims, Wall Street, and various authority figures. A guy who gave them permission – encouraged them, as demagogues and despots have done since time immemorial – to blame their problems on all these outside forces was a guy they could get behind, and they did. A wall to keep those forces at bay was just the thing. 

The beating heart of wall love: Racism

Like medieval bishops arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, there has been considerable parsing lately of the word “racist” – who and what qualifies. In fact, it’s not that difficult, and certainly isn’t solely about overt hatred. As columnist Charles Blow put it, “Racism is simply the belief that race is an inherent and determining factor in a person’s or a people’s character and capabilities, rendering some inferior and others superior. These beliefs are racial prejudices.”

Front and center in all the agonized yammering about what is and isn’t racist has been the question of whether Donald Trump is one. The answer here is also not difficult: Of course Trump is a racist. As Blow puts it: “…it is not a stretch to understand that Donald Trump’s words and deeds over the course of his life have demonstrated a pattern of expressing racial prejudices that demean people who are black and brown and that play to the racial hostilities of other white people.”

The latest is the blatant racism of his now infamous “shithole countries” remarks, but there’s much, much more, going back to 1973 when the U.S. Justice Department sued him and his father for systematically discriminating against blacks in housing rentals. Here, courtesy of the New York Times, is “Donald Trump’s Racism: The Definitive List.”

And so, the wall – a quintessentially racist idea which works in perfect harmony with the quintessentially racist Trumpist/Republican obsession with immigration. They – Republicans in general and Trumpists in particular – have built a religion around immigration as the root of all evil and the stemming of it as the answer to all of our problems. This is a formulation beloved by the simple-minded – people who are pleased by the easy solutions promised by demagogues everywhere, always involving the vanquishing of the “hated other,” and who consider any objections to these solutions to be political correctness.

With a mindset like that, you have no problem with a political bargain that tears apart the families of “dreamers” in exchange for a wall that keeps out all those Mexican rapists.

Fraud Commission Fades Away

Amidst the clamor surrounding the publication of Steve Bannon quotes characterizing Donald Trump as the mindless simpleton we already knew him to be, it was quietly announced by the Trump administration that the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity – widely known as the voter fraud commission, set up ostensibly to investigate Trump’s contention that millions of votes were cast illegally in the 2016 election -- was being disbanded. The president blamed “continuing legal challenges,” but the reality is that the commission never found any evidence of fraud -- certainly not fraud on the massive scale Trump spoke of -- and having met just a couple or three times and come to the quick conclusion that it had nothing actually to do, has now disappeared into the gloaming with barely a whimper.

Some months ago, Flyoverland made an offer to president Trump: Point us in the right direction and we will investigate and report on – and collect our Pulitzer prize for – the story of the century. That story is the one about the most massive voter fraud in the history of the Republic, as revealed by the president who said the popular vote count, which he was on the short end of by quite a bit, was wrong because as many as five million votes had been cast fraudulently. Our reasoning in making the offer was as follows: He must have a reason for saying that; he must know something; he must have some information, some evidence. Tell us or any news organization what that is – point us in the right direction, give us something, anything, to go on – and we will get to the bottom of it.

He did not take us up on our offer. That, of course, is because no such evidence existed and there was no large-scale voter fraud. It was simply something he made up. The commission was nothing more than a lame attempt to give legitimacy to Trump’s fantasies. As Senate leader Chuck Schumer put it: “The commission never had anything to do with election integrity. It was instead a front to suppress the vote, perpetrate dangerous and baseless claims, and was ridiculed from one end of the country to the other.”

This episode, though perhaps not as “sexy” as many of the dozens to hundreds of lies and scandals attributable to Trump, is instructive. It typifies his capacity for both self-delusion and for unashamed prevarication, not to mention his willingness to undermine vital American institutions for his own ends; and it serves as vivid testimony to the willingness of his more ardent followers to happily accept as truth whatever he says, no matter how frivolous or unsubstantiated.

I’m pretty sure that Trumpists, and Republicans in general, would not have accepted at face value the exact same claim, utterly evidence-free, if Hillary Clinton had made it: That five million fraudulent votes had cost her the election. Their howls of anger and ridicule would have been heard throughout the land.