Aside from occasional presidential lies, Donald Trump’s border wall ambitions haven’t generated a lot of headlines lately, though that’s likely to soon change. The Republicans’ domestic policy megabill set aside $46.5 billion for an “integrated border barrier system,” which will include the construction of hundreds of miles of barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border.
The enormous amount of new spending will also includes money for, of all things, the president’s preferred paint color. The Associated Press reported:
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Tuesday that the entire border wall along the southern border with Mexico is going to be painted black to make it hotter and deter illegal immigration — and she credited President Trump with the idea. Noem spoke during a visit to a portion of the wall in New Mexico, where she also picked up a roller brush to help out with the painting.
The Cabinet secretary added that the paint project is being done “specifically at the request of the president, who understands that in the hot temperatures down here, when something is painted black, it gets even warmer, and it will make it even harder for people to climb.”
There was, however, one relevant detail that Noem neglected to mention: The Trump administration already tried this same idea, and it didn’t work.
Let’s take a stroll down memory lane.
In April 2020, the United States found itself in an exceedingly difficult position. Covid was taking a severe toll on the public; hospitals were filling; states were struggling to keep up with the public health crisis; and the economy was reeling as the job market collapsed. It was against this backdrop that the president convened a White House meeting to discuss a specific policy goal.
It had nothing to do with the pandemic, however. The point of the meeting was to discuss Trump’s plan to apply black paint to border barriers.
Trump first started pushing the idea in 2019, at which point administration officials tried to explain to him that the painting project would waste too much time and money in pursuit of a goal that wouldn’t make much of a difference anyway. Border officials were confident at the time that Trump understood their concerns and would focus his energies elsewhere.
They were mistaken. In 2020, when the president should’ve been working on the pandemic, he ordered his team to start applying black paint to the barriers along the U.S.-Mexico border, insisting that it would make the barriers hot to the touch and discourage climbers. To the surprise of no one, Trump was wrong and those who tried to discourage him were right. Not only did the black paint fail to discourage breaches, it also started peeling off about a year and a half after it was applied. The whole endeavor was an expensive waste. And so, naturally, the Trump administration is giving it another try, expecting a different result, spending a lot of American tax dollars on an initiative that only makes sense in the president’s imagination. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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