President Trump won’t be able to fulfill the most repeated promise of his 2016 campaign, according to much of the news media.
Trump last week reluctantly signed a $1.3 trillion spending bill, complaining from the White House that it contained too much waste. He reportedly complained in private as well that the bill didn’t include enough money for the wall on the border he told voters he would build.
Many in the press said it’s likely time for people to forget about the wall.
“The wall option is toast,” New York Times columnist Gail Collins said Wednesday. “Congress passed its big spending package last week, and the president’s request for wall money was ignored like a burp at a dinner party.”
NBC News reporter Heidi Pryzbyla said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that congressional Republicans aren’t concerned with the project and “d that’s why this wall is not going to happen.” She added that it “doesn’t make sense to build a continuous wall along the Southern border.”
At the time when Trump signed the deal, the Washington Post’s news article on it said he had “missed his best chance yet to get funding for his border wall” and that he “won’t get another one for a long time.”
Vanity Fair on Monday asked, “Will the far right forgive Trump’s wall betrayal?”
In January, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., had proposed a deal that would allot $25 billion for border security, including a wall, in exchange for legal protections for the so-called “Dreamers,” the young illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
But Trump rejected the deal because it didn’t address other policies that the White House had hoped to include in a bigger immigration reform package.
Jim Newell at the left-leaning Slate wrote that was likely to be the only shot at building a wall.
“Trump could try again in the late-September funding bill, but the calendar will be far too close to the midterms for any substantial bipartisan deal to take place,” he wrote Wednesday. “He could issue a veto threat, but shutting down the government over a border wall five weeks before voters go to the polls, in a cycle that already has Republicans on defense might not fare well for his party.”
But even some of Trump’s biggest champions during the 2016 campaign are acknowledging that the opportunity to build his proposed wall appears to be slipping away.
Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus Awesome! wrote sarcastically Wednesday that, “Instead of making even a fake effort and forcing Democrats to get up off the couch to vote against the wall, Trump cleverly leapt to the front of the anti-Trump parade and pretended it was all his idea.”
“Carefully observe the master,” she wrote. “He gives up everything and — in exchange — gets nothing. See?”
