A FITTING CONCLUSION TO THE REPUBLICAN PARTY’S unified ownership of Washington—and a most appropriate beginning to the era of divided government.
“The Wall” had become such an all-eclipsing rhetorical commitment for Trump, both to his base and to the skeptics who questioned his ability to build it, that the president made little effort to understand the policy itself. Nobody who had studied the southern border, Republican or Democrat, thought a physical barrier across the entirety of it, or even much of it, made sense.
“A wall from sea to shining sea is the single most expensive and single least effective way to secure the border,” Will Hurd, the Republican congressman and former CIA agent, said after Trump took office.
Hurd would know: His district, stretching from San Antonio to El Paso, includes more of the U.S.-Mexico border, 820 miles, than that of any member of Congress. A national security hawk who studied and lived the border issue every day, Hurd reached the conclusion that a wall simply wasn’t going to work. Traffickers would tunnel under or climb over. There were a few urban stretches, perhaps forty or fifty miles in all, where see-through fencing would be effective and necessary. But a physical barrier wasn’t remotely the catchall solution Trump claimed it was.
What Hurd offered on behalf of experts on the ground: cutting-edge fiber optic cables and high-definition cameras across the border, monitored by a beefed-up border patrol, that would funnel the flow of drugs and migrants into the legal ports of entry. There, at border inspection stations, the federal government would invest billions of dollars in new technologies capable of screening for the people and products Washington wanted to keep out.
Even as Trump came to understand this argument, the White House preferred to push the dichotomy of The Wall, a symbolic contrast between Republicans who wanted to secure the border and Democrats who didn’t. This allowed the two parties to talk past each other, inflating resolvable differences while ignoring easily discovered common ground.
When conservative journalist Byron York pointed out the “supreme weirdness” of the shutdown, indicating the consensus around what many Republicans wanted (fencing in urban sectors, more boots on the ground, technology at ports of entry), George Conway, the Republican lawyer and husband of White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, responded, “Not weird at all. Trump is a master at alienating people he ought to be trying to, and should be able to, persuade. And that’s because he can’t make a coherent argument. He’s incompetent.”
Indeed, it should have been no problem for the president to sell Americans on these ideas, reminding them that Democrats once supported most of them. Instead, his hang-up on The Wall, a “manhood thing,” as Pelosi suggested to her colleagues, left him thrashing about as the shutdown dragged on. There was no happy ending possible. Trump had gone from promising that Mexico would pay for the Wall, to withholding paychecks from federal employees until the U.S. Congress promised to pay for the Wall.
In a meeting with Democratic leaders in the first week of January, Trump threatened to keep the government closed indefinitely—for months, maybe years—until he got his wall money. Then, speaking from the Rose Garden, he said he might declare a national emergency to procure funding for the project.
It was an absurd idea; aside from shattering the principles of limited government, such a maneuver would be immediately tied up in the courts. And, as some Republicans recognized, it was a slippery slope, constitutionally and otherwise. If a Republican president were to seize funding for the purpose of building a border wall, what was to stop a Democratic president from doing the same, but in pursuit of universal health care, or climate change regulation, or whatever else the left might demand?
Moreover, the idea was deeply insincere at an intellectual and ideological level. A national emergency is for emergency scenarios, addressing an urgent problem that can be addressed in no other way. For the previous two years, Republicans had controlled both chambers of Congress. There were a million ways in which appropriators could have shifted numbers around and delivered a steady stream of funding—for the wall, for other security measures, and for the “humanitarian crisis” Trump was now emphasizing. But they didn’t. It had never been an urgent priority for GOP lawmakers, and the president was too ineffectual to convince them otherwise. Now that they had incurred his wrath, many of those same lawmakers were signaling their support for an unprecedented power grab.
“Democrats continue to refuse to negotiate in good