(ANTIMEDIA) Washington, D.C. — While claiming he still has every intention of building his long-championed border wall between the United States and Mexico, President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he’s willing to postpone that controversial plan if it will allow Congress to agree on urgent legislation.
“President Trump insisted on Tuesday that he remained committed to his hotly disputed plan to build a wall along the Mexican border,” the New York Times reports, “despite backing off a demand that the project be funded in a short-term spending measure that must be passed by Friday to avoid a government shutdown.”
On Twitter, Trump reassured his supporters of his conviction and warned them not to be led astray by outside influences.
“Don’t let the fake media tell you that I have changed my position on the WALL,” the president wrote Tuesday morning. “It will get built and help stop drugs, human trafficking, etc.”
The border wall was one of Trump’s primary campaign promises and has been an issue of great debate since day one. Congressional Democrats had previously accused Trump of slipping the border funding demand in at the last minute, claiming the demand itself was holding up the process.
“If the administration would drop their 11th-hour demand for a wall that Democrats, and a good number of Republicans, oppose,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s spokesman, Matt House, said in a statement last Friday, “congressional leaders would quickly reach a deal.”
On Monday, while speaking on MSNBC, House’s boss equated Trump’s move to him throwing a “monkey wrench” into the works.
Wrench or not, the fact — according to the president’s own Custom and Borders Protection agency — is that illegal border crossings have dropped around 75 percent since Trump entered the White House, which raises the pertinent question of whether a wall is necessary in the first place.
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