2) It will help.
Here is the thing: a house with a fence around it is more secure than one without a fence, even if that, say, 4′ fence can be easily climbed. You hear people climbing it. You see people climbing it. And middle aged women aren’t going to climb over. 3 year old children will not climb over.
Imagine a house with 6′ walls on three sides. Is that house still not more secure than a house with no walls at all? Of course it is. The walls are not unscaleable, but it adds a layer of difficulty. You see the people when they are climbing over.
And this is more or less what Trump is proposing. He is not proposing a wall which cannot be defeated by anyone. He is proposing a wall which is much HARDER to defeat than open ground. Such walls will limit how many people try to cross, and how they try to cross. It won’t stop drugs, or human trafficking, but it will slow it down, and THIS IS GOOD.
Marginal improvements, self evidently, are still improvements.
The core issue, obviously, has nothing to do with policy. This is a pissing contest. Trump wants it, so Nancy Pelosi and Chuck “the corpse” Schumer want to oppose it through every cheap trick they have learned in lifetimes of cheap tricks, nasty lies, and enthusiastic corruption.
I had hope for a minute that Trump might be able lay off, say, 25% of the Federal workforce. Do you know it is nearly impossible to fire these assholes, even when they make fat money and do something close to nothing? This situation is unbelievable and presumably changeable somehow. Perhaps it will take Congress to fix this, but if you can’t fire dead weight, you accumulate it. Simple principle.
It does seem likely, though, that more and more people, the longer this thing goes on, are going to question what the hell the government actually does, when it employs nearly a million people who are not “essential”. I haven’t noticed anything bad. Have you? Can’t we just keep this up indefinitely? It’s not hurting me in any way that I can see. Perhaps I am missing something.
But this pissing contest is Trump’s to lose, which means there is no reason that Pelosi will not cave at some point, perhaps after the EBT payments start getting affected in a few weeks, or so I read. Again: these are hard core Democrats, who vote for a living, or something close to it. What can Trump lose by “losing” votes he never had to begin with? That’s all on the Democrats who, to be clear, are also pushing policies which in the long run will hurt the working poor in the United States.