The Daily 202: Wall fight underscores Trump's weaknesses

[DonViejo]

By James Hohmann
January 10 at 9:00 AM

THE BIG IDEA: Political fundamentals are shaping the wall fight in ways that aren’t being sufficiently reflected in coverage of the 20-day-old shutdown.

President Trump ran on a wall in 2016, and he lost the popular vote.

He tried to make the 2018 midterms a referendum on the wall, seizing on a caravan of migrants as the centerpiece of his closing argument and deploying troops to the southern border. Yet Republicans suffered their biggest losses in the House since Watergate, despite a booming economy with historically low unemployment.

The wall has never been a popular idea, a fact known to most Republicans in Congress. A litany of public and private polling shows that over 50 percent of Americans oppose building a wall. Support is in the high 30s to low 40s. Public support for shutting down the government to force construction of a wall is lower.

Trump himself has never been a strong president in conventional terms. In Gallup’s tracking poll, Trump’s approval rating has never risen above 45 percent. He’s never been more popular as president than the day he took office.

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2019/01/10/daily-202-wall-fight-underscores-trump-s-weaknesses/5c36c6361b326b66fc5a1bfc/

[DeanMH]

1. It's racism.

It's mine because I deserve it and they aren't good enough to have it. Period. Forget violence or crime or terrorism or social security or jobs or the economic cost of immigration. Those are merely overly inflated and mostly false distractions used to justify discriminating against another group of people. The wall = racism. It's that simple.