5 reasons why Trump's wall will only ever be a fantasy

Whether constructed of concrete or steel slats or solid gold bricks mortared with the joyful tears of bald eagles, the wall will never work in the fantastical way Trump says it will

President Trump.

President Trump's border wall is not real.

Well, I suppose it might become real — as in, it may physically come to exist — if this whole shutdown-for-funding gambit works. But it is not, will not, and cannot be real in the way Trump describes it. Whether constructed of concrete or steel slats or solid gold bricks mortared with the joyful tears of bald eagles, the wall will not work in the fantastical way Trump says it will. Whatever is or isn't constructed, it will never be the wall Trump is pitching, because what Trump is pitching is not a border barrier. It is a feeling.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE
https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up
Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.