Ann Coulter is blaming Trump again, not surprisingly:
The 3-D chess crowd has heaped obloquy on me for pointing out these facts. He’s doing his best! He’s fighting! No one has ever come under such sustained attack as our president! It’s not his fault! It’s Paul Ryan’s fault! It’s Mitch McConnell’s fault! It’s Robert Mueller’s fault! It’s the media’s fault!
I have a different yardstick, which is a harsh yardstick, but the only objective one: The only thing I’m interested in is results.
So far, Trump has spent 25 months not building the wall, capped last Friday by his signing a bill that will make it monumentally more difficult to do so.
Things have been very slow since the inauguration of Trump, with huge gaps in-between what little progress there has been. The biggest story for the past 2 weeks is not anything Trump has done, but rather a b-grade actor faking his own hate crime.
Trump is incapable/unable to deliver on his two major promises: draining the swamp and building a wall.
Instead of a “big, beautiful wall,” at best, maybe we’ll get 100 or so miles of a wire-fence by sometime in his second term. I recently learned that of the roughly 2,000 mile border, about 700 miles have a wall or fence today. This could make additional fences and walls redundant and could explain why progress has been so slow.
But Ann is wrong, because Trump’s options are extremely limited. Had he vetoed the bill it’s likely that his veto would have been overridden by a 2/3 vote.
A common argument is that “walls work well for Israel so why not America” but this argument falls short because Israel’s situation is different and in some ways worse than America’s. Israel’s neighbors are Palestinians, who are in much closer proximity to Israel’s densely populated areas than Mexico is to to the US, and much more hostile. The early 2000’s was a period of heightened violence between Israelis and Palestinians, with multiple suicide bombings against Israel occurring every month, which was a major contributing factor for Israel building their walls, but the bombings largely stopped after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004. If the same were happening now against the U.S., the likelihood of a concrete wall being built would rise dramatically, along with much tighter restrictions on immigration. These Mexicans that keep coming in generally want to mind their business, not blow themselves up. This is what policy makers are thinking and is the rationale for complacency.
As part of his pledge to drain the swamp, Trump during the second debate promised to appoint a special prosecutor against Clinton, but that too turned out to be hyperbole/rhetoric, with no such plans ever devised.
And now the dictator-appeasing, neo Nazi-KKK-dog-whistler extremist is launching a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality.
If this means the left will continue to nominate and support unwinnable candidates in the hope of neutralizing supposed Trump extremism, then maybe that is the ultimate 3-d chess.