The Art Of The Kneel: How Trump's Tactics Kept Shrinking His Wall

By Cameron Joseph
February 14, 2019 6:00 am

No big, beautiful wall after all.

After forcing the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, seeing his poll numbers take a hit and stirring consternation from a broad swath of Republicans, President Trump looks poised to accept a bipartisan deal that would get him just $1.375 billion for new border money, not the $5.7 billion in wall money he was seeking. That’s enough for only 55 miles of new physical barriers, and even less than the $1.6 billion he’d been offered by Democrats in pre-shutdown negotiations.

That’s the latest failing chapter in Trump’s border wall saga — one that’s frustrated Trump’s allies, infuriated GOP moderates, alienated independent voters and left him with almost nothing to show for it.

For more than two years of his presidency, most of it with unified Republican control of the city, Trump promised he’d build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. But he walked away at multiple points over the last two years that could have gotten him that deal, refusing to prioritize it or make real concessions to win enough support to pass legislation. He walked away from a Democratic offer in 2017 for $25 billion to fund the entire wall in exchange for protections for undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. He made a more concrete and more hardline proposal in early 2018 that Democrats were never going to be able to stomach. Then he waited until his party lost the House late last year to throw down the gauntlet on the border wall, forcing the longest government shutdown in U.S. history to try to get his way.

After billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy, mounting frustration from his own party’s lawmakers and a big hit in his own approval numbers, it appears that Trump will get less for the wall than what he could have gotten if he just took the deal on the table in mid-December.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders argued to reporters Wednesday morning that it was “disingenuous” and “just not true” to say the new deal would get Trump less of what he wanted than the deal that was on the table in mid-December.

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