President Trump’s campaign pledge to “build a wall” on the southern border is beginning to look like it could become a reality, even to many in the media who first thought it was an empty slogan, but are now coming around to the idea.
As talks over immigration between the White House and Congress ramped up this month, Democrats have signaled an openness to providing funding for a wall, and the idea has caught on among commentators and newspapers.
“How disadvantaged are the Democrats when it comes to negotiating?” Washington Post political reporter Philip Bump wrote Saturday, characterizing the tough spot Democrats are in on the immigration debate. “So disadvantaged that the senior Democrat in the Senate was willing to agree to something that his party hates (and most Americans oppose), in exchange for something that nearly everyone, including Republicans, support.”
That was a reference to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who pitched the idea of giving in on border wall funding as part of a plan to end the government shutdown. Schumer was willing to agree to billions of dollars in border wall funding in exchange for adding protections for Dreamers to a federal spend bill.
Trump ended up rejecting the offer, and Democrats eventually caved and agreed to vote to reopen the government on Monday on the promise of a GOP effort on immigration.
Still, the wall seems to be more and more of a certainty in the minds of the media.
The Post’s editorial board just two weeks ago called the wall “a dumb idea” but still said Democrats should give in and trade wall funding for legislation that offers legal protections to the Dreamers, young immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. In New York magazine, liberal writer Eric Levitz on Jan. 11 made what he called, “The Progressive Case for Giving Trump His Stupid Wall.”
“If the [Democratic] party helps Trump deliver on his symbolic priorities, they can probably secure far more consequential reforms on substantive issues,” he said. “In other words: They can probably win mercy for many of the most vulnerable people in the United States, if they just give Trump his stupid wall. … The best way out of this pickle is to give Trump his big, dumb wall. Yes, the wall is idiotic and a big waste of money — but it isn’t that big of a waste of money.”
In a tone of resignation, Francis Wilkinson of Bloomberg View also wrote that it’s time for Democrats to give in on the wall.
“Someone, somewhere, somehow is going to have to give President Donald Trump a piece of wall to stand in front of,” he wrote on Jan. 10. “It might as well be the Democratic congressional leaders Charles Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.”
Rich Lowry, editor of the anti-Trump National Review magazine, wrote in September that “Trump is paying the price for making The Wall the most powerful symbol of immigration restriction, when it isn’t particularly important or achievable.”
But last week, he had apparently changed his mind. “There is a very easy way for Democrats to get major concessions from President Donald Trump on immigration,” he wrote in a separate column. “Give him his wall.”
