What you say is all true, however, I did hear a conversation on NPR today with a conservative member of congress who wanted the Democrats to agree to fund the wall, and when the host asked him about Mexico paying for it several times, he did say in several different ways “that’s a fair question,” without trying to dance around it by saying “they’ll pay for it because we’re getting so tough!” But then of course he immediately pivoted to “we need [del]security theater[/del] border security regardless of who pays for it”.
Now, whether his base is the same as Trump’s base is another story.
A more accurate analogy would be if you decide to put up a fence between your property and your neighbor’s and declare “He will pay for that fence!”, although he’s stated repeatedly that he has no intention of paying for it and isn’t in any way responsible for it.
Yes, in that situation if your wife finds you at Home Depot buying fencing materials, it makes a lot of sense for her to ask you why the hell you’re buying the fence if you expect the neighbor to pay for it.
Because unlike the other hypothetical situation where a criminal is held legally and financially responsible for shooting out your window, your unilateral decision to build a fence around your property doesn’t do jack-shit in terms of obligating your neighbor to pay for it.
I disagree. We all know that there is no obligation for Mexico to pay, just like my neighbor has no obligation to pay for the property line fence.
But maybe in past years I have given the neighbor tomatoes and peppers out of my garden or venison steak after hunting. Maybe I helped him change a flat tire last year or I represented his son free of charge after a DUI charge last year.
We need a fence because his dogs keep coming over and shitting on my back porch, but he doesn’t want to pay? I’m not bothering him. I would rather not have a fence, but his dogs keep coming over (and please understand this is an analogy and I am not saying that Mexicans are dogs). Then he will pay in an indirect way.
And I think my wife would know that despite anything I said taken absolutely literally, that she really did not reasonably think that I was going to steal his checkbook or march him at gunpoint down to Home Depot.
I know we’re supposed to take Trump seriously but not literally. On this issue, however, he asked us (repeatedly) to take him literally. Watch any Trump campaign rally for confirmation of this.
ETA. If the promise to get Mexico the pay for the wall was not literally true, why should the promise to build any wall at all be taken more seriously? Let’s forget the whole thing
This is kind of an unrelated question, but maybe an interesting one. Don’t the Feds have to put the project out to bid, i.e., conduct a procurement? (I used to work in procurement for the Commonwealth of Mass. so have a bit of related knowledge). It’s not just like they decide one day to have XYZ Construction put up a wall. Various bidders have to submit their proposals, which would be judged not just on cheapest cost, but best overall. Then follow negotiations, scheduling, etc. etc.
I haven’t seen any talk about this kind of a process being initiated, so it got me to wondering. Conducting a complicated procurement can take the better part of a year.
And yet the history of the last two years is meaningless unless you postulate that Trump voters and supporters were taking Trump at his word. My cite is the dozens of pre- and post-election campaign rallies in which thousands of people screamed “Mexico” whenever Trump asked “who’s going to pay for the wall?”
A mentally deficit woman has a house, and believes that the ladybugs and earthworms which come to her garden from her neighbor’s yard are one day going to sneak into the house and strangle her (and please, understand, I’m not saying that immigrants are ladybugs and earthworms). You’re a drifter two-bit street hustler who sees an opportunity to exploit, so you tell her you’re going to build a wall which will keep all the ladybugs and earthworms out, and you’ll also make her neighbor pay for it (an obvious fantasy). On those grounds you convince her to take you in and you start to mooch off of her. You know the wall is a stupid idea, but you also know you need to keep talking about it, or she’ll throw you out, so you start insisting that her relatives shell out $1 million dollars to pay for it (which they won’t). As long as you keep talking about it, the mentally deficit woman will continue to put you up, and you continue to mooch.
What would really happen is that the dogs will dig under the fence and shit on your porch anyway.
Look, Trump was either lying through his teeth or so deluded that he thought that yelling at Mexico would result in their caving in and paying.
If he didn’t mean it, he wouldn’t have begged the president of Mexico to pretend that he was paying for it.
And I doubt that more than a few of his supporters didn’t believe it literally. They are that stupid.
So one point is it takes a lot of years to add up to $5 bllion.
The other is how much it would hurt the US. That funding is to help them with a little issue that affects us. Drug cartels already effectively control big chunks of the Mexican border region. They assassinate politicians and judges that they can’t bribe or coerce. Mexico committed their military over a decade ago to try and wrest back control. The security situation is still very bad. Cutting aid that mostly is directed to helping them with that issue likely makes the security situation much worse. There’s some negative side effects of a major trading partner on our border potentially descending into chaos. Think of Colombia under the Medellin cartel but on our border.
Come on guys. Trump was talking about building the big ol’ wall cause his supporters screamed and hollered and he felt like the king of the world at those rallys. He had no idea how to go about getting funding. Or if it was even possible. He’s a liar and a braggert and he thinks if he rattles the noisey wall business loud and long enough , he’ll win. He’s taking USA for a ride. He thinks he can bluff is way into it. Changing the name of the actual wall to the words ‘border security’ ain’t gonna cut it. Because that is not what he said while running. He said ‘an Actual wall’ would be built. What a joke!
That’s a different meaning of the phrase “pay for.” You’re using it in the sense of “face the consequences.” That’s obviously not what Trump meant when he said Mexico will “pay for” the wall.
Especially because during your entire courtship you kept repeating that he was gonna pay for the fence when you finally built it, and this promise was a big part of the reason your wife married you in the first place.
You’re glossing over the phone call between Trump and Pena Neto where Trump basically begged Mexico to pay for the wall, because otherwise “it would make me [Trump] look so bad and I [the lying dotard] have only been here a week.”
You can’t say that Trump didn’t think he could make Mexico pay for the wall. He literally was groveling and pleading for them to do so, because Trump’s reputation was at stake.
Or maybe you invaded your neighbor’s land after some of your bratty kids built a treehouse in his back yard, and then annexed the land yourself. And after that maybe you invaded him again, and took all the best land and named it California.