The White House says Democrats only oppose the border wall because they hate Trump

(Image credit: SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

published 17 October 2017

Congressional Democrats are not supporting efforts to fund President Trump's much-promised wall along the southern border, a White House representative said Tuesday, purely out of petty, political malice.

"Many Democrats, don't forget, many Democrats in 2006 voted for the Secure Fence Act," Marc Short, Trump's director of legislative affairs, argued on Fox News. "But now they don't want to fund it for political reasons," he continued. "They don't want the president to have a win." Short said that because the wall is key to national security, funding "will happen at the end of the year."

Trump's border wall is supposed to be see-through, up to 55 feet high, and possessed of a "big, beautiful door." Its price tag — depending on what features are included and, at this stage, whose estimate you use — would be in the tens of billions of dollars. The 2006 bill Short mentioned is part of the reason much of the border is already fenced. The places without a barrier tend to have mountainous terrain and extreme heat that together make both wall construction and illicit border crossings very difficult.

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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.