Jared Kushner Inadvertently Seems To Contradict Donald Trump’s Claim Of A ‘National Crisis’ At The Border
With the government shutdown entering its third week, no agreement has been reached between Donald Trump and Democrats. The Democrats are refusing to fund Trump’s wall, despite Trump claiming that America is in all kinds of trouble because of a “national crisis” at the southern border. Trump is no stranger to using a lot of rhetoric to get his point across, and one of the things he has said in support of his wall is that America faces a massive national security threat because of unregulated immigration at its southern border.
It is a viewpoint which has been completely dismissed by immigration experts and lawmakers, but Trump has made it a habit of not paying attention to those who disagree with him or people who are not his aides. So it would come as bad news when one of his very own, White House adviser and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, seemed to disagree with Trump when it came to a “national crisis” at the border.
Kushner said “he was bringing good outside business knowledge to the wall negotiations,” according to Politico.
“He said the reason the wall price was going up was because of an increase in customer utilization for the border. Customer demand, he said, results in overruns.”
OOPS! Did Jared Kushner accidentally contradict Trump's claim there is a 'national crisis' on the border?https://t.co/3mWxcIpn26
— Raw Story (@RawStory) January 6, 2019
As Raw Story points out, “customer utilization” means people using the border. So basically what Kushner is saying that the estimations in 2017 were higher than 2018 estimates because more people were crossing the border. So if the “customer utilization” of the border is going down, how is it that Donald Trump says that more immigrants are coming to America than ever before?
If Kushner was, however, referring to customer demand for the materials to be used to build the wall, the demand for steel will get much higher because of Trump’s trade tariffs on steel and aluminum. With Trump enforcing trade wars all over the place, estimates for the wall will keep getting higher to a point where it might be impossible to fund it no matter what.
Conservative estimates of the Department of Homeland Security show that the cost of the wall would be somewhere in the region of $21.6 billion, but even that is not considered a realistic figure. In raw materials alone, DHS estimated that “the border wall could cost nearly $70 billion to build and $150 million a year to maintain.”
It would be interesting to see if the president has a response to Jared Kushner’s assertion, but it is appearing likely that level-headed people within his own administration are getting increasingly worried about the continuing government shutdown and Trump’s attitude toward resolving it.
