How the wall has boxed in Trump
Before it became the chief sticking point in a government shutdown that threatens to consume his presidency at a critical moment, President Donald Trump’s promise to build a wall on the southwestern border was a memory trick for an undisciplined candidate.
As Mr. Trump began exploring a presidential run in 2014, his political advisers landed on the idea of a border wall as a mnemonic device of sorts, a way to make sure their candidate — who hated reading from a script but loved boasting about himself and his talents as a builder — would remember to talk about getting tough on immigration, which was to be a signature issue in his nascent campaign.
“How do we get him to continue to talk about immigration?” Sam Nunberg, one of Mr. Trump’s early political advisers, recalled telling Roger J. Stone Jr., another adviser. “We’re going to get him to talk about he’s going to build a wall.”
Talk Mr. Trump did, and the line drew rapturous cheers from conservative audiences, thrilling the candidate and soon becoming a staple of campaign speeches. Chants of “Build the wall!” echoed through arenas throughout the country.
Now, Mr. Trump’s fixation with a border wall — the material embodiment of his keep-them-out immigration agenda — has run headlong into the new realities of divided government, pitting him against Democrats who reject the idea out of hand. The impasse is particularly remarkable given that even some immigration hard-liners do not regard the wall as their highest priority and fear that Mr. Trump’s preoccupation with it will prompt him to cut a deal that trades a relatively ineffectual measure for major concessions on immigration.
“I’ve always thought it created a danger that he would trade almost anything in order to get the wall — I think that’s still a potential danger,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that argues for less immigration. “I’m still worried about that now.”
That fear has been realized at times when Mr. Trump has explored a deal with Democrats on granting permanent legal status for immigrants brought to the United States illegally as children, known as “Dreamers.” The president has always walked away at the last moment from committing to preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA, but on Friday, FAIR, an anti-immigration group, warned him again that it would be a mistake.
To many conservative activists who have pressed for decades for sharp reductions in both illegal and legal immigration — and some of the Republican lawmakers who are allied with them — a physical barrier on the border with Mexico is barely relevant, little more than a footnote to a long list of policy changes they believe are needed to fix a broken system.
The disconnect is at the heart of the dilemma facing Mr. Trump as he labors to find a way out of an impasse that has shuttered large parts of the government and cost 800,000 federal employees their pay. Having spent more than four years — first as a candidate and then as president — whipping his core supporters into a frenzy over the idea of building a border wall, Mr. Trump finds himself in a political box of his own making.
In transforming the wall into a powerful emblem of his anti-immigration message, Mr. Trump has made the proposal politically untouchable for Democrats, who have steadfastly refused to fund it, complicating the chances of any compromise.
“As a messaging strategy, it was pretty successful,” Mr. Krikorian said. “The problem is, you got elected; now what do you do? Having made it his signature issue, Trump handed the Democrats a weapon against him.”
The dynamic has been on vivid display this past week as Mr. Trump has argued that there can be no deal to reopen the government unless his wall is paid for, while Democrats, now in control of the House, have refused in ever sharper terms.
“A wall is an immorality — it’s not who we are as a nation,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday. “This is not a wall between Mexico and the United States that the president is creating here; it’s a wall between reality and his constituents, his supporters.”
Last month, in private comments to Democratic lawmakers after an Oval Office confrontation with Mr. Trump, Ms. Pelosi said the wall was “like a manhood thing for him.”
Yet it has also become an outsize symbol in the other direction for Democrats, many of whom supported at least some sort of barrier along the border in the past but now cast Mr. Trump’s wall as a travesty. Sixtyfour Democrats in the House and 26 in the Senate voted in 2006 for the Secure Fence Act, which provided for hundreds of miles of fencing along the border. Among them were Sens. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer.
“The only things that have changed is the situation at the border is worse and Donald Trump got elected,” said Kellyanne Conway, the president’s counselor.
Beyond the symbolism, Democrats now argue that a wall is an expensive and ineffective means of curbing illegal immigration.