During President Donald Trump’s frenzy of tweets Monday, he appeared to contradict himself on funding for his border wall within minutes.
First, he promised: “MEXICO IS PAYING FOR THE WALL.” Then, in the next tweet 11 minutes later, he attacked the Democrats for what he predicted will be their decision to allocate “NOTHING to border security, namely the Wall.”
He followed up with a head-scratcher about “some things” that “NEVER get better and NEVER change,” adding, “You have Walls and you have Wheels.”
Trump is now claiming that “savings” from an updated NAFTA agreement with Mexico will pay for the wall, but how that would work remains a mystery.
Trump’s contradictions and flip-flops are complicating any compromise that would end the partial shutdown of the government, which began Dec. 22.
Outgoing chief of staff John Kelly told the Los Angeles Times in an interview last week that the idea of a concrete wall was dropped by the administration early in 2018 for a fence or another kind of barrier. “To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly said. Trump spoke of “beautiful steel slats,” rather than a wall, in mid-December. On the night Trump refused to sign a spending measure without funds for a wall, triggering the shutdown, he posted a video calling for a “wall or a slat fence or whatever you want to call it.”
On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C) said that the wall is simply a “metaphor” for border security, which would involve a “barrier where it makes sense.”
But Trump doubled down on his campaign-promised concrete wall on Monday, saying the idea of an “all-concrete wall” has “never been abandoned.”
As for funding, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) made a point recently about that:
