Op-Ed: It's Not About the Wall

 

By Steven Jonas

Trump's most famous campaign promise, "Build the Wall and Mexico Will Pay for It," was never about a Wall, per se. Trump is so disinterested in any kind of real Wall, that he doesn't even know: a) how much of one there already is, b) how many other kinds of other barriers there already are, c) how many miles of the Mexico/U.S. border are either virtually impossible or prohibitively expensive to build on, d) that El Paso is one of the safer cities in the U.S., e) that there is a difference between Latino workers coming to find jobs that are being offered by U.S. employers at below U.S.-worker wages (and such workers would not be coming if such jobs were not being offered by, let's say, Trump-owned resorts) and refugee/asylum seekers, seeking to enter under the provision of U.S. and International law (about which Trump obviously knows nothing). And so on and so forth.  

So, if it's not about the Wall, per se, what is it about? (Let me say here that I know I am not telling the politically and Trump-ily aware folks in the U.S. [and indeed around the world] anything most of you don't already know. But I thought that it might be helpful to put it all in one place.) First and foremost, and this is very well-known, talked about far and wide, from the advertising master Donny Deutsch on MSNBC to the economics master Paul Krugman in The New York Times, it is about Trump's most valuable winning card: racism. As is well-known, Trump began his campaign for the Presidency not when he descended the golden escalator in 2015, but when he jumped up the birtherism movement in 2011. Then on the escalator he broadened the racist message from African-Americans to Latinos, specifically in the beginning to Mexicans. 

The "drugs-rapists-criminals-gangs" message has only been intensified in recent months, as the fight over wall money has itself intensified. But it did not have to, for the first two years of the Trump Presidency. In fact, it might be speculated that a reason that Trump did not seriously go for some significant sum of Wall money when he had the whole of the Congress is a sign that indeed the Wall per se is not the issue. For, and it is what I am speculating here, that what Trump wants is not a Wall, but the Wall-issue, as the symbol of his racism that is, for a significant portion (but not all) of his base, his most important characteristic.  

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Source: OpEdNews.com