Trump in His Castle

The president of the United States of America has made his obsession with constructing a border wall with Mexico the center of his political discourse.

What started off as a crazy idea for the electoral campaign of a candidate with little discipline and few complex arguments has turned into the backbone of domestic policy for the most powerful democracy in the world. At the same time, the country has been dragged into an unprecedented crisis. The president of the U.S., Donald Trump, has tied up his grand obsession with building a wall with Mexico into a Gordian knot for political debate and this has had significant consequences both at home and abroad.

The Democratic opposition categorically refuses to allocate a part of the budget to finance this belligerent and ineffectual plan. This is a project that represents the U.S. in a way that contradicts its tradition as a country where anybody in the world can arrive and fulfill his or her ambitions. Far from dialogue, the reaction from the leader has been to proceed with a partial government shutdown, a measure that, as time passes, is increasingly detrimental to citizens and the public employees who are going without a salary during this period – and which has provoked ill feeling among Republican ranks.

Trump insists that the need to build a wall responds to “a humanitarian and security crisis.” Two factors that dismantle this fallacy should be emphasized. Firstly, a humanitarian crisis is resolved by adopting urgent measures that alleviate the immediate material situation of the victims of those circumstances, never by constructing a physical barrier – something that has precisely the opposite effect. Secondly, not even the most hardened sector of the Republican Party, those most opposed to immigration, consider the wall to be a priority.

While Trump remains stubbornly embedded in a project that paralyzes his own country at the border with Mexico, finding a solution is made complicated by a lack of imagination, dialogue and international cooperation − three concepts that are alien to the current occupant of the White House.