Thread: Donald Trump: Big Beautiful Wall Is ‘Steel Slats’

(Tweets at Link)

Donald Trump: Big Beautiful Wall Is ‘Steel Slats’


December 18, 2018

Neil Munro


Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty

The big beautiful border wall promised during the 2016 campaign is being built as a see-through barrier of steel slats, President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night.


Trump’s concession and rhetorical turnaround come after the Hill Democrats used their leverage on the business-first leadership of the GOP — and among Trump’s Hill outreach deputies — to repeatedly block construction of his favored concrete walls.



The prototype concrete walls are standing in the sand near San Diego.




In March 2017, according to Axios, Sen. Chuck Schumer:

At the same time, GOP leaders slow-rolled Trump’s budget requests and engineered the 2018 defeat of his “Four Pillars” immigration reform in complicated Senate and House votes.


However, Trump is getting a few billions of dollars to extend the 30-foot steel-bollard walls, which border agents prefer because they can see through them to the Mexican side of the border. The bollard walls come with steel plates to deter climbers and cost roughly $20 million a mile, complete with roads.




Trump may get $1.6 billion for extra border walls in 2019 depending on the outcome of the closed-door negotiations on Capitol Hill.

But the 2019 budget deal reportedly also will block several cheap labor visa programs pushed by business groups, sources tell Breitbart News. That is good news for the President because it will help push up wages and salaries before the 2020 election.


https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2...s-steel-slats/

Trump’s fake wall is built on falsehoods, lies and deception

• 13 hrs ago

WASHINGTON — Throughout Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency, he repeatedly promised to build a high, impenetrable, concrete wall along America’s nearly 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

And he further promised that it wouldn’t cost American taxpayers one red cent, saying he would make Mexico pay for it. “Who’s going to pay for the wall?” he asked legions of supporters at his campaign rallies, who yelled back in unison: “Mexico!”

How could a U.S. president force Mexico — a sovereign nation and a major trading partner — to pay for it? Trump didn’t say, and his supporters didn’t ask, even though the current president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and his predecessors said their nation would never pay for its construction. And that’s their position to this very day.

During his campaign, Trump met with a group of past and present Mexican heads of state near the border, and when the meeting broke, reporters asked what they had told him about the wall. “It never came up,” Trump replied.

When Mexico’s then-President Enrique Pena Nieto came out to meet with reporters, who told him what Trump had said, Pena Nieto replied, “Is he kidding? That was the first subject I brought up.”

But it wasn’t long before Trump knew he couldn’t make good on his promise, and soon after his inauguration he was asking Congress to foot the bill and cough up tens of billions of dollars from America’s taxpayers to pay for it.

After all, Congress was entirely controlled by Trump’s party, and surely they’d come up with some seed money to get it started. It hasn’t happened.

The House and the Senate resisted, not only refusing to include any money for the wall in its budget, but also offering just a billion or so for general border security, saying that the funds could only be used to build or maintain existing fencing, not for a concrete wall.
But that didn’t stop Trump from declaring victory for his imaginary wall. Just as he had convinced voters he would force Mexico to pay for it, he began telling his supporters earlier this year that “We’ve started building our wall,” he said in a speech on March 29. “I’m so proud of it.”

His statement was flat-out, undeniably, utterly false.

“Despite the facts, which have been cited numerous times by fact-checkers, Trump repeated his false assertion about an imaginary wall 86 times in the seven months before the midterm elections,” ace fact-checker Glenn Kessler reported Tuesday, “according to a database of false and misleading claims maintained by The Washington Post.”

Kessler, who’s become nationally famous for his “Four-Pinocchio” awards to politicians who have trouble with the truth, has awarded them to Trump so many times that he has had to come up with a special award for him: “The Bottomless Pinocchio.”

“The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things; he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation,” he writes.

For example, “Trump has 40 times asserted that a wall was needed to stem the flow of drugs across the border — a claim that is contradicted by the Drug Enforcement Administration, which says most illicit drugs come through legal points of entry. Traffickers conceal the drugs in hidden compartments within passenger cars or hide them alongside legal cargo in tractor trailers and drive the illicit substances right into the United States,” he says.

In addition, the deadly drug fentanyl “can be easily ordered online, even directly from China.”

Other claims Trump has repeatedly made include his statements that the U.S. “has the worst immigration laws in terms of keeping immigrants out,” Kessler writes. “That’s simply not true. In fact, the United States has among the world’s most restrictive immigration laws.”

But Trump showed no sign of abandoning his imaginary wall this week when he met with Democratic leaders in the Oval Office Tuesday, threatening to shut down the federal government if Congress does not include his request for $5 billion in start-up wall funding.
But Democrats are offering little more than $1.3 billion, though only for fencing, and told him, in effect, that he will likely take the blame if he follows through on his threat.

The bottom line is simply this: Neither Republicans nor Democrats want this wasteful wall built. And for the time being, Trump’s wall exists only in his imagination.

https://www.cleburnetimesreview.com/...0fe1dd054.html

The bottom line is simply this: Neither Republicans nor Democrats want this wasteful wall built. And for the time being, Trump’s wall exists only in his imagination.

Hmm, I guess Trump's not the only one that lies about a border wall. This is the first I've heard regarding Republicans not wanting the promised wall ........ unless they're talking about members of congress.

WED, DEC 12TH, 2018 BY LEO VIDAL


Trump’s Statements About Border Wall Yesterday Were Mostly Lies

Donald Trump said on Tuesday that much of the border wall he wants has already been built and has been “very effective.” But that is not true.

He apparently was referring to old border fencing built decades ago. And nothing he’s done has been “very effective.”

Even with his hard-line immigration policies and inflammatory rhetoric attempted border crossings and border arrests have increased significantly over the past year.

Here is what Trump said during his meeting with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer:

“A lot of the wall is built. It has been very effective. I asked for a couple of notes on that. If you look at San Diego, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent once the wall was up. El Paso, illegal traffic dropped 72 percent then ultimately 95 percent once the wall was up. In Tucson, Arizona, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent. Yuma, it dropped illegal traffic 95 to 96 percent. When I say dropped, the only reason we have any percentage where people got through is because they walk and go around areas that are not built. It dropped virtually 100 percent in the areas where the wall is. It is very effective.”

Most of what Trump is provably false. Looking at each of his claims in more detail:

New sections of the border wall

• Trump said: “A lot of the wall is built. It has been very effective.”

Under Trump, the military has installed 70 miles of concertina wire. Separately, border authorities have worked on improving existing structures. Only one of those projects started and finished under Trump.

Also, while Trump says that border fencing has been “very effective,” he didn’t mention that illegal border crossings are increasing.

According to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials, there were nearly 397,000 people arrested trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border in the 2018 budget year. That number represents a spike from the 300,000 figure in 2017 and puts levels on par with 2016 before Trump took office.
Illegal traffic

• Trump said: “San Diego, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent once the wall was up.”
• 
  

According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the “wall” in San Diego was built in 1992, and, the agency spokesperson told ABC News, “Illegal traffic has dropped 92 percent over the past 23 years.”

There has also been a new border construction project in Calexico, California, about 120 miles from San Diego, but that 2.25 mile project was started “well before” this administration too, the CBP chief at that port said.

• Trump said: “El Paso, illegal traffic dropped 72 percent then ultimately 95 percent once the wall was up.”
• 
  

DHS said El Paso border security was built in 1993, and since then illegal traffic “dropped 72 percent in one year and 95 percent over 22 years.”

This administration completed a remodeling project there, but that project started before Trump was in office.

• Trump said : “In Tucson, Arizona, illegal traffic dropped 92 percent. Yuma, it dropped illegal traffic 95 percent to 96 percent.”
• 
  

DHS officials said that the Tucson structure was built in 2000 and Yuma construction started in 2005 — both well before Trump was elected. DHS officials said that illegal traffic has dropped in Tucson by 90 percent in the past 15 years, and by 95 percent in nine years.

All of the above data shows that drops in traffic were not the result of any of Trump’s policies, and border structures were built long before Trump became president.

Terrorists caught at the border

• Trump said: “People are pouring into our country, including terrorists. We have terrorists. But we caught 10 terrorists. These are over the last very short period of time — 10.”
• 
  

This comment came from Trump’s Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, who has said that DHS blocks “10 known or suspected terrorists a day from traveling to or attempting to enter the U.S.”

But Nielsen was not referring to immigrants coming in over the U.S.-Mexico border.

The State Department said in a report last year that there was “no credible information” that any member of a terrorist group traveled through Mexico to enter the United States.

In summary, Donald Trump continues to lie instead of provide facts to support his beloved border wall. This is why nobody in Congress wants to provide billions of dollars to fund the project. They know it won’t work, and they know it is only being proposed because Trump recklessly, and irrationally, promised his core base of racist supporters that a wall would be built once he became president.

https://www.politicususa.com/2018/12...stly-lies.html