I am willing to admit all the talk of the Wall and how much it will cost and who is going to pay for it is a bit of misdirection.
First, of all, our Govt. spends so much money already that adding the cost of a wall would be a teeny percentage of the overall budget.
I think that instead, what Trump is doing with the wall talk is genius. I know some of you will immediately recoil at that, no matter the facts, but here is what I mean. This country has an immigration issue. a huge one. And has for decades. There are all sorts issues at play. But the the media ignores it. They just refuse to talk about it. On the rare occasion they do, it is almost always a story about human rights abuse (possibly even death) of the persons crossing the border. That's it. There is almost never any discussion of the tremendously high costs to the US caused by this issue.
But Trump has done the impossible. His wall issue has forced the media to talk about it. The details of The Wall really dont matter. What does matter is that they are discussing it, every night. He is manipulating them by forcing making them talk about something they would rather ignore and hide from. I think this partially explains the generalized in which he speaks about The Wall. He realizes that it really doesnt matter what they say, as long as they are saying something. Trump might not be "driving the narrative," but he is forcing the topic. By doing this, he is outwitting both the media and all the other politicians (in the future, there will be entire Poli Sci classes devoted to the study of the Trump).
Look at was has happened as a result. The proof is right in front of you. He has more than the TV talking heads and newspapers talking about immigration, he has the entire country talking about immigration. (as an example, I ate local Mexican food last night, and his speech was on all the TVs. And folks were watching it). This is something that probably no one else could have accomplished. From my perspective, it is a remarkable feat.
Before Trump got into this race, they all just paid it lip service to immigration. No one was actually going to do anything. They have been saying they would deal with it for a long time but never have. As some of you know well, the wall (or part of it) was actually funded by Congress pre-Obama. But, of course, only a tiny section actually got built.
How has this all happened? My simple take is that campaigns are expensive and in order to run one, you need money. The people rich enough to fund campaigns and who were willing to give it to you, want cheap labor. They want it for their multi-national corporations. They also want good, cheap nannies and yard workers. And as long as they controlled politicians via the purse strings, nothing was ever going to happen. Or, if anything did happen, it would be even worse than what we have now.
So, along comes a guy rich enough to self-fund, who does not take money from Billionaire-Globalists (because he does not want to owe them anything), and the whole political scene gets turned upside down. The people actually have a voice now. This Trump moment right now could be huge in historical terms. It could change the entire system. We will see.
One of the greatest amusement to me of this campaign, among so many, is how Trump has turned all the people who say they want money out of politics into babbling hypocrites. All those people who have cursed and bemoaned Citz. United have suddenly gone silent. Trump has taken money out of politics, at least on one side, and they still hate it! They hate it even more now than they did before! And, you know what they say about haters.
