TRUMP RIPS TEXAS BORDER WALL BUILT BY SUPPORTERS
President Donald Trump on Sunday criticized a privately built border wall in South Texas that’s showing signs of erosion months after going up, saying it was “only done to make me look bad,” even though the wall was built after a months-long campaign by his supporters.
The group that raised money online for the wall promoted itself as supporting Trump during a government shutwon down that started in December 2018 because Congress wouldn’t fund Trump’s demands for a border wall. Called “We Build the Wall,” the group has raised more than $25 million promoting itself as supporting the president.
Former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon is on the group’s board.
The company that built the private section in January, North Dakota-based Fisher Industries, has since a $1.3 billion border wall contract from the federal government, the largest award to date.
The section in question is a roughly 3-mile fence of steel posts just 35 feet from the Rio Grande, the river that forms the U.s.-mexico border in Texas. That’s much closer to the river than the government ordinarily builds border barriers in South Texas because of concerns about erosion.
Trump tweeted Sunday in response to a Propublicatexas Tribune report that the riverbank has started to erode.
“I disagreed with doing this very small (tiny) section of wall, in a tricky area, by a private group which raised money by ads,” Trump wrote. “It was only done to make me look bad, and perhsps it now doesn’t even work. Should have been built like rest of Wall, 500 plus miles.”