CPAC: Trump bleats out his latest border wall delusion about Biden
Donald Trump made his appearance at CPAC on Saturday, and his speech was, as usual, a long list of personal grievances interspersed with self-aggrandizement. One new claim that emerged, though, is that the Biden Administration took away his border wall and, well, hid it.
Trump has made a variety of conflicting (and often probably false) claims about the southern border wall since his presidency, including claiming last summer that his administration had actually finished the construction.
Now he’s moved forward to a new fantasy, in which the Biden Administration took away the wall, which was “sitting there waiting to be installed,” and “put it in a hiding area.”
Trump seems to be dramatizing the storage of unused materials — although, with his rambling and prevaricating, it’s never too clear.
Regardless, he’s now characterizing this as the removal of finished wall portions, perhaps to bolster his false claims that his administration did complete an ineffective and untenable construction as a monument to xenophobia.
In fact, while Trump claims to have completed 450 miles of wall during his tenure, the truth is that only about 80 miles are newly blocked by construction, although old structures were also repaired or replaced.
As for the hundreds of miles still unwalled, Trump now has a new excuse:
“The wall was sitting there waiting to be installed, the easiest part, and Biden, they took it away so Texas and Arizona couldn’t use it….they actually took it away and they hid it. They put it in a hiding area, which of course was revealed pretty quickly, all you have to do is send a couple of helicopters up…”
Trump added that if he’s re-elected, “we will seal it up and expand that wall so we have total control.” (Video below.)
This claim may be getting stale, though, even for an audience that believed him when he claimed in the 2016 campaign that Mexico would be forced to pay for the construction. (As expected, U.S. taxpayers have instead footed the bill.)
In fact, Trump’s administration completed 80 miles of construction “in locations where no barriers previously existed,” and the completed wall, including already-extant borders, totals under 800 miles of the nearly-2,000 total miles of border, according to a 2021 fact check from KHOU.
Watch Trump’s ridiculous claim at CPAC below, then keep scrolling to see a clip from July, when he insisted the wall had been completed.
https://twitter.com/lyndastraffin/status/1632226272704077825
The clip from July follows.
Trump: We finished the wall pic.twitter.com/PzNke6czwx
— Acyn (@Acyn) July 23, 2022
Steph Bazzle covers politics and theocracy, always aiming for a world free from extremism and authoritarianism. Follow Steph on Twitter @imjustasteph.
