Donald Trump: Big Beautiful Wall Is ‘Steel Slats’

Steel Slat Border Wall
Guillermo Arias/AFP/Getty
Neil Munro

The big beautiful border wall promised during the 2016 campaign is being built as a see-through barrier of steel slats, President Donald Trump tweeted Tuesday night.

Trump’s concession and rhetorical turnaround come after the Hill Democrats used their leverage on the business-first leadership of the GOP — and among Trump’s Hill outreach deputies — to repeatedly block construction of his favored concrete walls.

The prototype concrete walls are standing in the sand near San Diego.

In March 2017, according to Axios, Sen. Chuck Schumer:

… has concluded that denying President Trump his wall is perhaps the surest major defeat Democrats can hand the President in his first year.

…

The evolving plan, being discussed by Schumer’s office and Senate appropriators: If Republicans put money for the wall into a bill, Democrats block it. It doesn’t matter what else is in the bill — Schumer will make it about the wall. The way Democrats see it, if they can block the wall, they’d crush a central feature of Trump’s political identity. And as the face of the strategy, Schumer would thrill the Democratic base

At the same time, GOP leaders slow-rolled Trump’s budget requests and engineered the 2018 defeat of his “Four Pillars” immigration reform in complicated Senate and House votes.

However, Trump is getting a few billions of dollars to extend the 30-foot steel-bollard walls, which border agents prefer because they can see through them to the Mexican side of the border. The bollard walls come with steel plates to deter climbers and cost roughly $20 million a mile, complete with roads.

Trump may get $1.6 billion for extra border walls in 2019 depending on the outcome of the closed-door negotiations on Capitol Hill.

But the 2019 budget deal reportedly also will block several cheap labor visa programs pushed by business groups, sources tell Breitbart News. That is good news for the President because it will help push up wages and salaries before the 2020 election.

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