‘We Are Not Going To Build This Stupid Vanity Wall,’ Vows Democrat Ted Lieu
Democratic representative from California Ted Lieu ridiculed Donald Trump in an interview broadcast Saturday, vowing that the president’s “stupid vanity wall” will not be built, Raw Story reports.
Ted Lieu discussed Donald Trump’s Christmas government shutdown with MSNBC’s Alex Witt, calling it a “failure” of the Republican party, which still controls both chambers of the United States Congress. “Let me remind American people what Donald Trump said last week, ‘I am proud to shut down the government.’ We are now in day one of the Trump shutdown,” Lieu said.
As detailed by a previous Inquisitr report, although adamant to get funding for his expensive border wall, President Donald Trump is fighting an uphill battle, alone, isolated, and ostracized, lacking support from Republican colleagues. Trump has repeatedly blamed the shutdown on the Democratic Party, insisting that the opposition does not care about the security of the American people.
But according to Ted Lieu, “Democrats are certainly happy to talk about border security.” Apart from pointing out that the Democratic Party is willing to discuss border security, the California Democrat took a swipe at Trump, calling his border wall a vanity project, and vowing that it will not be built.
“We are not going to build this stupid vanity wall of Donald Trump’s with U.S. taxpayer dollars.”
Lieu asserted that Donald Trump had promised during the 2016 presidential campaign that Mexico would pay for the wall, and not the American people. “Donald Trump’s number one campaign promise was not the wall, it was that Mexico would fund the wall. The only way he is going to get his wall is if Mexico funds it,” the lawmaker said.
Trump’s claims that Mexico will fund the expensive border project have backfired. Needless to say, the Mexican government has not agreed to fund the wall, but the president has found a way to spin this, claiming on multiple occasions that Mexico will indeed pay for the wall “one way or another.”
As reported by the New York Times, Trump suggested that Mexico would pay for the border wall through the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a revamped NAFTA. According to the NYT, the trade agreement does not in any way stipulate that Mexico will pay for the wall, so Trump’s claims are “baseless.”
Trump shuts down government in fight over wall he promised Mexico would fund https://t.co/7IW7GOG9AC pic.twitter.com/fNvQQlwNGw
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) December 22, 2018
President Donald Trump has made a lot of noise about his border wall, evidently going as far as shutting the government down over it, but the noise appears to have served another purpose as well. It has obfuscated data and research which overwhelmingly show that immigrants contribute to the American society in multiple ways, instead of taking away from it.
A 2018 Cato Institute study, for instance, demonstrated that both legal and illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes than native-born Americans.
