Despite soaring cases of coronavirus in Arizona
Trump’s people think it’s time to change the plan, but Trump doesn’t wanna.
In what amounts to a relaunch of a relaunch, Trump now travels to Arizona, a battleground state, to embrace his most comfortable signature issue with an event marking the 200th mile of his wall on the US-Mexico border (most of the construction has in fact replaced existing barriers).
The president will then speak at a “Students for Trump” event in Phoenix. Despite soaring cases of coronavirus in Arizona, his campaign team will be hoping for an enthusiastic turnout to get back on track.
In other words despite the fact that cases are swiftly rising in Arizona, Trump is eager to put more people at risk of illness and death because he enjoys shouting at crowds. What a mensch.
Observers argue that Tulsa was a warning that he needs to reset, not least because of the health risks of big indoor rallies – but there appears to be little chance of him heeding advice.
“From what I’ve been told, Trump just insists on these rallies and he wants more and not fewer compared to 2016 because he’s got all of the trappings of office and he can fly Air Force One low so people can be awed and all the rest of it,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
He doesn’t care that he’s killing people so that he can fly Air Force One low so people can be awed. His fun in being in Air Force One when it flies low is more important to him than any number of deaths.
“Obviously, he didn’t calculate properly for the pandemic and other factors. He thinks they can correct it and go on. He wants one every couple of weeks or more frequently. He didn’t learn a thing. His campaign staff would gladly give them up, along with the tweets, if they could. But they can’t.”
Well, that’s Trump, isn’t it. He doesn’t learn things because he’s incapable of learning, and his staff can’t persuade him to do less-stupid because he prefers more-stupid.
I’m a little tired of the media narrative that the new wall only “replaces existing barriers”. In fact many of these barriers are vehicle barriers only, which look like a widely spaced iron picket fence. Unlike the old barriers, the new wall acts as a barrier to vulnerable wildlife who don’t respect borders. The new wall also disrupts the hydrology of the border region where they build the wall across seasonal rivers.
The construction itself has been just as heinous. As Fisher Sand and Gravel has continued to build have dynamited sacred cultural sites, torn up protected public lands and the flora that live on it. Not to mention that they are tearing a massive road along the wall and pumping millions of gallons in groundwater to mix concrete to lay the wall itself.
@#1 I wondered about this too, the wildlife is locked in, or out, depending on the side. Any migratory species will have a tough time there. Reminds me of the Alaska pipeline, where they put deliberate wildlife crossings to mitigate this problem (which only partially helped). It’s going to be an ecological disaster, most man made projects that change the environment are. Just watched Ken Burns’ Dust Bowl documentary incidentally, which shows what a disaster we can create when we put our backs into it. Also they are destroying people’s farms under the phony authority of ’eminent domain’, which, while it might be good for a few infrastructure projects, its bogus for a border wall. Totally unnecessary and ineffective, walls can be breached pretty easily if one is determined. Tunnels, a cutting torch, a big machine, it’s stupid to think a wall is impervious. It is however a good political tool for the nationalists and separatists, but it’s a pretty big waste of time and resources otherwise.
In other words, Trump is a stupid asshole. Most rural Arizonans, and rural Californians for that matter, know the value of the migrant workers and understand and tolerate the Mexican population that wishes to flee a third world country to try to make a better life. They are not all drug cartel members and criminals, actually a very small percentage of them are, just people who want to earn a living and feed their families. The nationalist narrative would have you believe they are all criminal scum who are sucking the social services dry, but this is propaganda. Without the migrants, whether legal or not, the vast majority of agriculture in the West and Southwest would collapse. Rich bastards from NYC don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around this.
Indeed twiliter-the ecological consequences will be dire. I think the humanitarian impact will be drastic as well. I only moved to the border region in the Southwest in the last year (thankful to be back in the west after living in the midwest for a spell) so I don’t have a full sense of what’s going on yet, but I get the feeling that the wall will only create more of a market for human smuggling. It’s becoming increasingly difficult for migrants to make the journey in the more hospitable crossings, so many are being forced to more dangerous and remote paths where finding corpses dead from exposure and dehydration is routine. Furthermore, the Border Patrol is actively harassing, arresting, and discouraging humanitarian activists trying to to leave water and food or provide medical attention.
I don’t have evidence to back this up so take it with a grain of salt, but I am concerned that more people will become reliant on the cartels and smuggling rings to transport them (organizations which have no compunctions on abusing and extorting the migrants). Given how far most of the migrants and asylum seekers have traveled (I’ve heard of several cases where individuals have traveled from as far as South Asia or Africa), they are going to be desperate. It’s a politics of deliberate cruelty, and it does nothing to stop the flow of hard drugs (a significant chunk of which comes through legitimate ports of entry) or stop the violence.
You are certainly right, economic migrants (legal and no) prop up agriculture country wide. Heck, most of the farms and meat processing plants where I lived in the midwest were staffed by seasonal workers from Mexico.
We could probably put this comment on nearly every post.
As an ecologist, I have long fussed against the wall. Regardless of what your thoughts may be about immigrants, if you give a flying f**k about the survival of the world (both human and wild), wildlife must be able to move.
The thing is, Trump supports neither understand this, nor care. To them, protecting wildlife costs money and gains nothing. They are unable to see the need to protect the environment, nor care about anything beyond their own skins. I have tried to educate people in this field (that is my job, after all), and found that it is impossible to break through the impregnable wall created by the Heritage Foundation and Fox News – even with people who are unfamiliar with them. The information spreads like a virus.
Ecological misinformation could turn out to be a more deadly virus than COVID-19.