Gilbert Garcia says Trump’s legacy is the wall he built between us.
ALAMO — It looked like a tailgate party on a college-football Saturday.
Long rows of cars and trucks were parked along the narrow shoulder on Alamo Road, just south of the Rio Grande Valley town of Alamo.
The line of vehicles was just around the corner from the entrance to the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge, adjacent to a section of U.s.-mexico border wall that President Donald Trump used Tuesday as a backdrop for a stage-exiting celebration of himself.
Eight days before he was due to leave office, and six days after his loyalists stormed the Capitol because they believed his unfounded claims that the 2020 election had been stolen from him, Trump’s rhetoric focused on wall building. But his true agenda was legacy building.
The people who parked on Alamo Road didn’t need any convincing. They weren’t able to get anywhere close to Trump’s border event, but they didn’t seem discouraged. They were there for each other, after all.
“Trump 2020” banners and American flags waved from their vehicles. One truck displayed a large sign with the image of Uncle Sam, and a caption proclaiming, “I Want YOU to Make America Great Again!”
The members of one family faced the passing drivers and held signs saying, “Jesus Heals” and “Pray.”
This was about Trump supporters lifting each other up at a time when their hero is limping out of office with Cabinet members quitting on him, members of his own party turning on him and House Democrats preparing to impeach him for a second time.
About 10 miles north of that car caravan, 100 people gathered in front of the San Juan headquarters of LUPE (La Unión del Pueblo Entero), an organization founded by César Chávez, the legendary farmworkers organizer.
This gathering was meant as an antidote to Trump’s border photo-op. At the LUPE rally, you felt undiluted anger.
Anger that Trump had helicoptered in to use their community as a prop. Anger that he was once again using undocumented immigrants as the scapegoats for a multitude of problems in the United States. Anger that he seemed unaware or uninterested in the fact that Hidalgo County is beset with sky-high COVID-19 infection rates, colonias with minimal infrastructure and extreme income inequality.
Former San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro drove down to the Valley for the LUPE rally and said Trump was leaving office the same way as he came in, by inciting hate and division.
“The most significant thing about the Trump presidency is not the wall he’s built around us,” Castro said. “It’s the wall that he has built between us.”
Melissa Cigarroa, a Laredobased member of the No Border Wall coalition, said Trump had played to the worst prejudices of his fan base by depicting the border as a “dangerous war zone.” She called for Presidentelect Joe Biden to sign an executive order on Day One of his presidency, putting a halt to border wall construction.
“Not another foot of wall,” the crowd chanted along with Cigarroa.
The signs at the LUPE rally felt like they’d been crafted from a different universe than the one inhabited by Trump’s car caravan: “Chump Go Away”; “1 Mile of Wall Could Pay for 300,000 Vaccines.”
The parallel worlds operating 10 miles from each other drove home what an all-in or all-out proposition Trump remains after four years in the White House.
Three other U.S. presidents — Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush — were voted out of office in the past 45 years. None of them, in their final days in office, would have motivated a large crowd of devotees to line up along the shoulder of a road just for the honor of spending a few minutes in the same zip code as the president.
On the other hand, none of those presidents would have generated the kind of contempt that you sensed at the LUPE rally.
Ford, Carter and Bush all left office with the bipartisan sentiment that they were honorable men, if unsuccessful presidents. Of course, none of them spent two months after their election loss making unfounded claims about voter fraud or stirring up an insurrectionist mob with the false notion that Congress had the power to overturn the election results.
During his 20-minute border speech, Trump was the same vainglorious mess he’s always been. He alternately touted his border security efforts and whined about having his Twitter account permanently suspended.
He also suggested that Democratic calls for Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to relieve Trump of his duties “will come back to haunt Joe Biden.” (The latest in an endless series of Trump swipes at Biden’s cognitive function.)
Trump entered the stage to Lee Greenwood’s cornball classic, “God Bless the U.S.A.” He exited to the strains of the Village People’s gay disco anthem, “Y.M.C.A.”
It was a wildly incongruent conclusion to what was meant to be a somber speech about border security. But being wildly incongruent is Trump’s jam.