Here:
When he ran for president in 2016, few of Donald Trump’s
promises thrilled his supporters more than his pledge not just to build a
wall on the southern border, but to force Mexico to pick up the tab.
“And who’s going to pay for it?” he’d say at his rallies. The crowd
would shout back joyfully, “Mexico!” It wasn’t about the money; the
point was to conjure a fantasy of America standing tall and dominating
our neighbor; their humiliation would be our glory.
A fantasy is just what it was, as Trump now admits. At a speech
in Iowa on Sunday, he blurted out the truth. “When you hear these
lunatics back there,” he said, pointing at the news media, “say, ‘Trump
didn’t get anything from Mexico,’ well, you know, there was no legal
mechanism. I said they’re going to help fund this wall, but there was no
legal mechanism. How do you go to a country, you say, ‘By the way I’m
building a wall, hand us a lot of money.’”
Of course it was about the money. Everything is about the money.
It wasn't a fantasy to neoliberal Bush 43 pal Vicente Fox, who took it seriously enough at the time when Trump first proposed to make Mexico pay that he wouldn't pay.
This is revisionist history by Trump and by Waldman, which pretends there was no Border Wall Funding Act of 2017, nor serious elite opposition to its provision for a foreign remittances tax.
Trump would simply like to erase the history of his phony immigration promises, and Waldman would simply like no one to entertain seriously the particulars, which show there is a giant pot of money easily taxed to pay for border security.
Foreign remittances to the Latin South reached $142 billion in 2022, and Mexico's share was $60 billion.
The government of the United States farts away billions of dollars every minute of every day. Funding a $25 billion wall is a flea on that elephant's back. The fierce opposition to it is the thing of real size.
