Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:46 pm
One of Donald Trump’s major campaign promises appears to be on its deathbed, according to sources inside the president-elect’s transition team who say that Trump wants to pay for the wall via “the appropriations process.”
Trump lets Mexico off the hook? House GOP officials say Trump will ask Congress to pay for building the wall. https://t.co/bRA4OZeVvV
— CNN Breaking News (@cnnbrk) January 6, 2017
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In other words, taxpayers – not the Mexican government, as Trump repeatedly said during the campaign – will be paying for the president-elect’s monumental waste of money along the southern border.
According to the CNN report, the process of funding the border wall may begin as early as April and could be done without even having to pass a new bill.
More from CNN:
The Trump team argues it will have the authority through a Bush-era 2006 law to build the wall, lawmakers say, but it lacks the money to do so. Transition officials have told House GOP leaders in private meetings they’d like to pay for the wall in the funding bill, a senior House GOP source said.
“It was not done in the Obama administration, so by funding the authorization that’s already happened a decade ago, we could start the process of meeting Mr. Trump’s campaign pledge to secure the border,” Indiana Republican Rep. Luke Messer said on Thursday.
Trump likely knows that he couldn’t pass legislation to approve the type of wall he’s proposing, so he’s hoping to bypass Congress to get it done.
What’s unclear is just how the president-elect will explain away what will be an undeniable abandonment of a promise central to his campaign from the very beginning.
Even after his bungled trip to meet with the Mexican president last year, Trump reiterated “100 percent” that our neighbors to the south will be funding his wall to keep immigrants out.
Video evidence:
Building a Mexico-funded wall on the border was one of the first promises Donald Trump made as a presidential candidate. Despite the fact that illegal immigration from Mexico is actually declining, his supporters took the spoon and swallowed it whole. It was – and still is – one of his biggest applause lines at rallies.
Now, one of his first acts as president will be showing those same supporters that he was just playing them for suckers all along.
Will they notice?
Sean Colarossi currently resides in Cleveland, Ohio. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was an organizing fellow for both of President Obama’s presidential campaigns. He also worked with Planned Parenthood as an Affordable Care Act Outreach Organizer in 2014, helping northeast Ohio residents obtain health insurance coverage.
