Manju longs for another “borg” experience and pines for the mental fijords.

However, I wonder if Trump is now deliberately dragging things out.
There was too much Democrat and Republican opposition to a full-scale building project the last two years, but support for more control & stopping the influx of would-be migrants is growing with the increased pressure on the border, and may flip the public, and the Congress, more in his direction if it continues.

Democrats & Leftists don’t have a monopoly on exploiting crises, real or fake.

Surely there must be a reasonable explanation (with which to be “dignified”?)….

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. I base my opinion on this:

1. When Trump had control of both Houses, there is no evidence of him twisting arms to get his number 1 promise thru. Had he put up great fight and lost, I wouldn’t have said what I said.

But there was nothing. No “Cornhusker Kickback” to use Scala’s reference to what Obama did to get Obamacare thru a filibuster-proof majority. Whether you like his policies or not, you all saw Obama take office and push thru his biggest promises: Obamacare and a Keynesian Stimulus that has led to the longest expansion in US history.

We simply didn’t see this with Trump, even on Repeal and Replace. He had no plan for McCain to support. I suspect the reports that he gets into the office at 10 and golfs by 12 are true, and in line with his record of failure as a businessman.

2. General Kelly has said as much…that Trump, early in his term, gave up on the wall once he realized that it wasn’t logistically possible.

3. All the illegal immigrants working for him, even into his Presidential term, lend credence to the notion that he really doesn’t care about the issue.

4. The issue reappeared as obvious propaganda (an Invasion) during the midterms and then after he lost control of the House, i.e. after it became politically impossible for him to build the wall.

5. He has said that the wall was already built. This indicates that what he really wanted was for people to think he’s built one, as opposed to actually building one. This is in-line with his career of claiming to be a self-made billionaire. He’s more interested in people believing he is one than he is in becoming one.

I believe Trump would’ve been happy if his base went along with that lie the way they did with other ones…like N.Korea has denuclearized or that he turned around the economy. But here was a rebellion, led by Ann Coulter. That’s why we are hearing about it now.

The epithet “racism” is bandied about so much these days that most people using the term have no concept about what it really entails. The R-word as used by the Left and its jihadist accomplices is meant to silence anyone who disagrees with their principles. Thus, it is imperative that the lies perpetuated by these nefarious groups be continually highlighted.

In fact, real discrimination is at its height in the Muslim Middle East. The discrimination against the Palestinians in Lebanon, Syria, Kuwait, Libya, and Gaza should be headlined every day in all the major news outlets.

Don’t hold your breath.

Did you know the following?
…
The next time impassioned individuals scream racism, it is time to set them straight. They may claim that the governments of Arab states grant basic human rights to their citizens, but “[a]ccording to annual reports compiled by the State Department, most of the Arab states are ruled by oppressive, dictatorial regimes, which deny their citizens basic freedoms of political expression, speech, press and due process. …

Giulio Meotti explains how “there is a blanket of terrible silence in the Western media” about Human Rights Watch’s unprecedented report about Palestinian authorities’ use of torture to crush dissent.

The rejoinder to anti-Semites like Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib is, “Why are the U.N. and other international institutions remaining silent as Palestinians are being thrown out of their jobs in an Arab country while more than 100,000 Palestinians enter Israel on a daily basis for work? Will we see an emergency meeting of the Arab League or the UN Security Council to denounce Lebanese apartheid and racism? Or are they too busy drafting resolutions condemning Israel, which has opened its doors wide to Palestinian workers?”

…

No, Omar and Tlaib are the racists who incite hatred. But with education, the rest of us can unequivocally reject their screeds and bigotry. Let’s put a requiem to their racism by truly describing what goes on. These tyrannical congresswomen hate the facts because, as the late Rod Serling stated, “to them logic is an enemy and truth is a menace.” So we need to keep telling the truth.

Even worse, it’s terribly uncouth. Boorish. Unmannerly.

Such things are simply not done.

In what culture it is common practice that a married couple would take a short break from a long 17 years of marriage so the wife could go legally marry some random dude off the street temporarily for three years, while evidently still remained to be living with the original husband the whole time?

“I see no irregularity here, Omar could marry whomever she wanted to” – still said by liberals

You comment, “One day you will wake up an realize that ‘Trump has not built a single mile of new border fence after 30 months in office.’ You will then realize that he never even tried.”

I’m willing to be persuaded by what you’re suggesting. (I can’t say that you’re asserting it, because you haven’t directly done so. I guess you’re saying that Trump was never interested in reducing illegal immigration into the United States, didn’t mind one whit if it actually increased, and that all his posturing on the topic was mere campaign-stop deceit.)

I’ve long held that Trump only communicates things about his worldview through policy-actions, and never through words; and that he uses words exclusively in order to “push buttons on reality to see what happens.” (If what happens is advantageous or entertaining, he pushes them again until it stops working.) If this thesis is correct, then his Twitter feed is literally the most successful disinformation program ever fielded by the U.S. Government: It comes straight from the U.S. President, but nothing written therein has any relationship to anything the U.S. President believes to be true about the world, but only about what provokes politically helpful reactions in readers.

So, like I said above, I’m willing to be persuaded that Trump prioritizes reducing illegal immigration at zero or below-zero priority level. Nothing he’s ever said on the topic counts as evidence to the contrary, because he said it using words.

HOWEVER…,

1. The article you link doesn’t support the idea that Trump doesn’t care about reducing illegal immigration. At best, the article supports the idea that he is more ambivalent about it than his rhetoric lets on. But the article is also consistent with other explanations; such as that he…
(a.) is hamstrung by lack of legislative support because of the Democrat-controlled House (and before that, the functionally-equivalent control of the House by GOP establishment types who don’t much care to stop illegal immigration);
(b.) didn’t prioritize it highly enough to completely exhaust all of the (paucity of) allocated funds before now;
(c.) saw regions of the existing fence requiring repair as higher-priority than constructing new regions in unfenced areas, probably because those fence-regions were already positioned in higher-value areas; and/or,
(d.) didn’t want to move to complete the wall too quickly (even supposing that he could) because if he did, he’d lose one of his base’s strongest incentives for prioritizing his re-election efforts.

2. Please remember that the President of the United States has, constitutionally, very limited-and-indirect domestic power, especially “power of the purse.” To show that Trump really doesn’t give a crap about reducing illegal immigration, one has to show that there are things he could have done but didn’t. It’s trivially true that he couldn’t possibly have gotten a whole-length-of-the-border massive barrier constructed by now, even with a House that was populated by 435 anti-illegal-immigration “hawks.” But instead of that, he’s had a majority of pro-illegal-immigration Democrats since 2018, and a majority of soft-on-illegal-immgration Republicans before that.

So you have to ask, first, what he could have done under those circumstances. Then you follow that up by asking, “Of the things he could have done but didn’t, are there any reasons other than deceiving his base that explain why he hasn’t done them yet?”

Finally you have to ask, “Do his other policy moves suggest a lack of concern about illegal immigration?”

After you’ve provided a compelling argument in all those stages, you’ll persuade me that Trump is completely uninterested in reducing illegal immigration.

But at present, I believe he is interested in reducing it, because…
(a.) he’s repaired border fences in high-priority areas, which he didn’t have to;
(b.) he changed the asylum rules, which he didn’t have to;
(c.) his best play for re-election is to show himself as being constantly obstructed by wailing, unhinged Democrats, while trying to keep his promises in a broad sense (reducing illegal immigration) even if he’s unable to keep them in a narrow sense (specifically building a “big beautiful wall”). That allows him to paint a contrast between himself and Democrats as a contrast between a mostly-honest half-liar who’s brash and inexact but tries to do what he’s elected to do, and insane, anarchistic, totalitarian maniacs who want open borders.

As I said, I’m willing to be persuaded otherwise. But my current view, I think, fits better with the evidence on hand.