The Incredible Disappearing Wall

I recently received a manifesto (there is no other word to describe it) from a longtime reader who hates me.

Over the years, this reader has frequently sent emails calling me an idiot and/or a racist, with colorful phrases throw in that describe his feelings about Latinos in general.

In any case, he is — shockingly — a hardcore Trump supporter who has been clamoring for that fabled wall on our southern border, which his messiah promised back in 2016. But this same reader just wrote me to say that he is now completely against the wall and thinks constructing one would be a disaster for America. 

Has he seen the light and renounced his bigotry? Has he realized that the wall is nothing more than a moronic campaign slogan? Did my writing influence him to change his flawed thinking?

Ha… no.

My longtime pen pal has informed me that he’s uncovered the brilliant double-cross, long-con, super-duper reverse psychology that leftists have engineered. He says that liberals only claim to be opposed to the wall, when in actuality, they want it built. In his words, “the bloodthirsty socialists are going to seize power” after the last brick is put in. At that point, the wall will be a barrier to trap all good, decent Americans in the hellhole that leftists have inflicted on this nation. He just wanted to let me know that he’s on to this, and that “patriots are not going to support your plot to turn us into East Germany.”

Damn… we progressives almost had you there.

Now, besides illustrating the bottomless depths of paranoia that passes for conservative thought, my faithful reader has also shown that the wall — once a symbol of Trumpism — has turned into a farce of epic proportions and the biggest reason why the word “boondoggle” exists.

You see, we’ve already endured the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, ugly political fights over the power of executive orders and eminent domain, and a misguided reshuffling of our military’s priorities — all to serve the personal whims of a scatterbrained wannabe despot who has “the long-term decision-making ability of an empty chair.”

And still there is no wall.

Things have gotten so desperate that right-wing citizens are raising money to fund the wall themselves. As I’ve previously written, one group has collected $20 million, which is enough to build about a mile of Trump’s barrier. But even that pathetic scaling down of expectations doesn’t look like it’s going to happen because… well… um… the money cannot be accounted for. 

Apparently, $20 million has just gone missing, all by itself.

Yes, the founder of this delusional endeavor is “a prolific operator of hoax pages on Facebook, and money he raised in the past to help veterans’ programs in hospitals never actually went to those hospitals.”

And now, the proposed deadline for groundbreaking on the privately funded wall has come and gone. At this point, “Trump supporters who donated to the crowdfunding effort want to know where their money went.”

It’s a good question. Although an even better question is how could people be so consumed by bigotry that they would give their hard-earned cash to a guy with a shady past to fund a xenophobic project that would accomplish nothing? And as a follow-up, are they aware that, even if the money reappears and is applied to construction, “the vast majority of the border … exists on land owned by the federal government — land where private citizens cannot build their own walls”?

Oh well, at least their hearts are in the wrong place.

With such a cavalcade of corruption, incompetence, and stupidity coalescing around all things related to the wall, it is no wonder that my conspiracy-obsessed reader is now dismissing the barricade that he once so aggressively championed. He says it’s because he has uncovered a left-wing plot to commandeer the wall. But clearly, he just wants to distance himself from total failure. 

It’s hard to say definitively, and I’m not going to ask him to find out.

Because I don’t correspond with crazy people.