Biden’s best way to move on from Trump? Ignore him and his wall

As Trump fights impeachment, he will continue to do what he loves most and does best – dominate the headlines and divert attention from the efforts of others
Justice and decency tell us to prosecute him, but political pragmatism tells Biden to ignore him and focus on the important work of making America great again

David Dodwell

Published: 10:00pm, 17 Jan 2021

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I and millions more are counting down the minutes to Wednesday and the inauguration of US President-elect Joe Biden when the malignant Trump presidency will splutter to an end. His expulsion from Twitter has already brought a welcome silence and profound relief, but to imagine President Donald Trump’s dreadful legacy will die on January 20 could be wishful thinking and would be a huge mistake.

Even as, beyond Biden’s inauguration, Trump fights impeachment through a complicit Senate, he will continue to do what he loves most and does best – dominate the media headlines and divert oxygen from the efforts and achievements of others.

Just as the incoming Biden administration attempts to focus on the restoration of calm, tackling the country’s worst-ever health crisis and shoring up the livelihoods of millions of Americans whose jobs have been wrecked by pandemic lockdowns, Trump’s impeachment theatre will mesmerise and distract.

The danger is also high that other Trump theatrics will continue in the coming months to divert political attention from the urgent, serious but ultimately unexciting tasks weighing on the Biden administration. Trump’s true legacy might prove to be his infinite capacity for “entertaining distraction” – the daily victory of fact-free theatre over substance.

Even now, two months after his electoral defeat, he continues to stir his credulous supporters with fact-free claims that election fraud on a massive scale somehow stole victory from him.

05:52

Trump supporters storm US Capitol, interrupting Congress’ certification of Biden’s victory

So, too, has he ignored the pandemic that is killing more than 4,000 Americans a day and the millions of jobless families. His only recent public appearances have been to stir an American supremacist horde into storming the Capitol building and to fly down to the Alamo to celebrate his “historic” accomplishment – the Mexico border wall.

For Trump and many millions of his supporters, that wall remains at the very heart of his immigration policy and his legacy. In his wall visit last June, he claimed he had “done more than any administration in history to secure our southern border”.

In 2019, a Pew poll said 58 per cent of Americans opposed his wall-building efforts. Even so, the same poll found that a staggering 82 per cent of self-described Republicans were in support of Trump’s wall, despite his barely building any of it and world history showing that walls achieve little.

When he laid out his wall-building initiative as a foundation for his immigration policy, his hubris shone through: “I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.” He promised to build 1,600 kilometres of wall – at the time there were about 1,000 kilometres – and that he would get Mexico to pay for it.

01:20

Trump declares national emergency over border wall

Four years later, the emptiness of his claims is clear. A US Customs and Border Protection report says around 730 kilometres of wall have been built, but just 75 kilometres are new wall. The rest replaces existing dilapidated stretches of wall, mostly in California, Arizona and New Mexico. It has cost around US$15 billion, and not a penny has come from Mexico. It has been paid for by American taxpayers.

Is it money well spent? In terms of migrants detained, the answer must be no. From a 2000 peak of 1.6 million migrants detained, the low point was in 2011 during the Obama administration with just 300,000. The 2019 total rose to 850,000 migrants from 400,000 detained when Trump came into office. Evidence suggests that most undocumented immigrants and most contraband cross into the US not through areas “protected” by the wall but rather through established border crossing points.

Hacker cracked Trump’s Twitter account by guessing password was ‘maga2020!’

Biden’s administration is clear that Trump’s fixation with walls is destined for the rubbish bin. Biden’s website says: “Building a wall from sea to shining sea is not a serious policy.” Funding for further walls will be cut and focus will shift to improved screening at ports of entry.

Data from Harvard University’s Shorenstein Centre suggests the international history of walls shows Biden is right. Of the 70 border walls built worldwide since 1990, evidence of effectiveness is poor. Deeper history – embracing Qin Shi Huang’s Great Wall built 2,400 years ago, Hadrian’s Wall marking the northern limit of the Roman Empire and the 300-kilometre Gorgan wall down to the Caspian Sea – says more about the hubris and testosterone of megalomaniacs and emperors than anything else.

Browse through the quaint 2008 travelogue Walls: Travels Along the Barricades by Canadian author Marcello Di Cintio and evidence from more recent walls is the same. Whether it is the berm built by Morocco’s King Hassan II to keep the desert Sahawaris at bay or Indira Gandhi’s 4,000-kilometre barrier along India’s border with Bangladesh, evidence consistently suggests they all failed at what they were intended to achieve.

I vividly recall Colombia University’s Jagdish Baghwati offering a rare and counterintuitive defence of the habit of building walls as ineffective but “splendid” policy: “To be seen to be doing nothing at all … would be politically explosive since it would be read as indifference or indecisiveness. Building a fence was the least disruptive way of doing nothing while appearing to be doing something.”

If Baghwati is right, then building a big, beautiful wall is right up Trump’s street. When politics is theatre rather than substance, doing nothing while appearing to be doing something by building a wall must surely be the perfect ruse.

The Englishman obsessed with preserving China’s Great Wall

Biden should not knock the wall down. He should simply ignore it. An ignored wall ceases to be a barrier at all. Knock it down and you feed oxygen to Trump and his acolytes. Ignore it, instead focusing on initiatives of substance, and you starve Trump of the oxygen his megalomania craves.

My conclusion? The best way of putting Trump behind us is to starve him of the attention he desires. Justice and democratic decency tell us to prosecute him, but political pragmatism tells Biden to ignore him and get on with the more important substance of making America great again. Let the wall stand and be ignored.

David Dodwell researches and writes about global, regional and Hong Kong challenges from a Hong Kong point of view

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