Earlier this week, President Donald Trump took to primetime to make his case for funding his border wall, the same wall he promised his base Mexico would pay for. But now on the 21st day of a government shutdown, his TV appearance did little to sway the American public, which is now increasingly placing the blame for the shutdown on the president and whose support for the wall is wavering.
After repeatedly promising that Mexico would pay for his 2,000-mile border wall, President Trump is now saying he never made such a promise. Speaking to reporters Trump said, “obviously, I never said this, and I never meant they’re [Mexico] going to write out a check.” But according to the Washington Post, Trump has made this promise at least 212 times, and even included it in a March 2016 memo. Trump must’ve forgotten the time he cancelled two scheduled visits with then-Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto over the wall, or when he threatened to cut off billions of dollars in remittance payments from Mexican nationals in the U.S. to families back home.
Now tied for the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, President Trump continues to hold the government hostage until he receives $5.7 billion in U.S. taxpayer money to fund his wall. But is a government shutdown worth the construction of a Mexico-U.S. border wall? Hundreds of thousands of federal workers are going without pay, citizens are destroying national parks, the TSA will be closing down security checkpoints at airports around the country, and the FDA announced it would no longer be performing safety inspections on food.
