2020 could be the year that Trump’s border wall finally rises or falls.
After nearly three years in office, Donald Trump is months behind schedule on his signature campaign promise—and he’s fending off criticism from both the right and left about his sluggish progress. To date, Trump has completed only 80-some miles of border fencing, nearly all of which replaced smaller existing barriers in California and the Southwest. In Texas, he’s only managed to replace a few miles of fence in El Paso, break ground on a couple tiny stretches of new wall in the Rio Grande Valley, and clear some federal wildlife refuge land.
If this were a Manhattan real estate deal, Trump presumably would have fired the guy in charge. But as reelection looms, the president is putting his foot on the gas in two deeply Trumpian ways: trying to steer contracts to a construction executive who’d repeatedy appeared on Fox News, and putting his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, in charge of the project. Trump and Kushner’s goal is to build about 500 miles before the election. For them, the stakes are purely political; for Texas fronterizos, they’re all too real.
