After the repealing of the Affordable Care Act “exploded” right in U.S. President Donald Trump’s face last Friday, the immediate question the healthcare failure aroused in Mexico was: when will the projected border wall’s plan blow up?
The answer lies in an old mystical Sufi adage that says when you have an enemy, sit back and wait until he passes, in a coffin.
Trump’s border wall plan may also be dead, as in just a little of over 60 days President Trump seems to have forgotten about it.
In fact, he opened up biddings for companies to quote on the project that was going to be resistant to all forms of climbing and tunneling, and indeed response was extensive as some 500 U.S. construction companies showed interest in it.
Yet the wall may never happen. One reason is lack of money. It was easy for candidate Trump to promise his followers and eventual voters that “Mexico will pay for it,” but he has now backed down after President Enrique Peña Nieto stood his ground saying “no” to the very idea of shelling out pesos to pay for the projected wall.
But if Mexico does not pay, U.S. taxpayers refuse to do it as well. Some two weeks ago, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly sent Mr. Trump a budget projection on the “beautiful” and “aesthetically agreeable” wall he was hoping for and the total bill amounted to a whopping $21 billion. In his budget request recently sent to Congress, President Trump asked for $2.5 billion, a blatantly insufficient amount for a construction that size.
Still you hear some of Trump’s voters shouting “build that wall” but there are other reasons why this forever-unrealistic venture will continue to crumble down.
Regardless of the election outcome, Trump is one of the few U.S. presidents who won the electoral-college with a minority vote. Private organization Pew Research did a poll recently and the outcome was that 61 percent of U.S. citizens oppose the construction while only 36 percent support it. That sends a very clear message to President Trump and what Hillary Clinton called the “basket of deplorable” supporters who now are confronting that winning the presidency was a task too big for their breaches.
Then there’s the repudiation reaction in Mexico as to separating our sister nations with a wall. Even General Collin Powell, who spoke at the Mexican Banking Convention in Acapulco last week, deplores the wall and President Trump’s insistence in keeping his promise to those who voted for him.
Furthermore, constructing a wall along the border, particularly from El Paso to Brownsville, Texas, is a gargantuan endeavor, as the Rio Bravo or Grande supplies water to both sides of the border. If you ask anyone in Texas if they want that wall, their answer is no.
Particularly because many of the farmers and ranchers along the river would be forced to sell their properties to the federal government, and they did not like it when President Trump recently threatened to confiscate the land for public use if necessary.
If Trump went this far, he’s going to have a behemoth legal problem that will only add to the woes he’s already facing in his short stay at the Oval Office. No president of the United States has the need of being slapped with a class-action suit.
Last, but not least, is the opposition in Mexico itself. Just last Sunday even the Catholic Church jumped into the fray accusing all the national profiteers who offer the sale of materials to build the wall of “treason.”
What’s the Catholic Church got to do in this imbroglio? Nothing, but it was a show of nationalism and “the wall makes social peace in Mexico vulnerable.”
Also “From The Faith” publication said in last Sunday’s editorial that the wall would be a “monument to intimidation and hatred.”
The Catholic Church doesn’t have to worry because cement manufacturers such as Cementos Mexicanos (Cemex) and Cementos de Chihuahua, both Mexican companies with plants in Texas, have filed notices that they would not under any circumstances sell cement to the wall project builders, if there ever are any.
The 2008 Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman was in Toluca — just outside of Mexico City — on Monday where he said that President Trump’s two months in power “are certainly the worst two first months for a U.S. president in history.”
But for the first time in these two months, President Trump had to swallow his abundant pride and admit the Obamacare repeal defeat; that was indeed a bad walloping.
Among other things, the border wall is next!
