What the columnists said

Trump so-called compromise is a “total sham,” said Greg Sargent in The Washington Post. First of all, the DACA kids already had legal protection until Trump yanked it away in 2017 by executive order. The Senate bill that incorporated his temporary DACA protection was “loaded up with poison pills” impossible for Democrats to swallow. In the fine print were provisions banning desperate Central American children from applying for asylum at the border and requiring them to apply in their home countries. It would limit asylum admissions to a tiny 15,000 a year, and significantly raise the bar for judging asylum claims, requiring that any approval be “in the national interest”—a vague term designed to justify mass rejections.

Why won’t Democrats negotiate? asked John Fund in National Review.com. Simple: Pelosi knows “President Trump has been hurt more politically than the Democrats by the government shutdown,” and her base, afflicted with “Trump Derangement Syndrome,” views him as “a devil they must defeat at all costs.” That means not even a single nickel for a wall—an unreasonable stance that may soon shift “the onus for the shutdown” onto Democrats. The American people’s patience is running thin, said Naomi Lim and Daniel Chaitin in the Washington Examiner. But Trump is no less “walled in.” Doing nothing is politically untenable; and yet offering even a temporary DACA “amnesty” leaves his base howling over perceived betrayal.

This stalemate could go on for a long time, said Ronald Brownstein in CNN.com. This power struggle is not really about a literal wall anymore, but the “powerful symbol” it’s become. Older and rural Americans want the government to halt or at least slow the country’s “growing ethnic and racial diversity.” Progressives see the wall as a “symbol of racism.” Sadly, the wall proposed as a barrier between America and Mexico has been transformed into a metaphorical one rising on the “fault line separating blue from red America.”