For the president’s edification I drew a line approximating where his proposed wall would go along the pictured section of the border.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that not only do we have the most psychologically impaired president in history, but we also have more evidence (as if we need it) that Rex Tillerson was correct when he called Trump a moron.
NBC News has a detailed report of a July 20 meeting between Donald Trump and his military advisors that clarifies why Tillerson, the secretary of state, allegedly disparaged the president behind his back. At the meeting, Trump reportedly astonished military leaders by saying he wanted to rebuild the nation’s nuclear stockpile to its peak level of the late 1960s—a tenfold increase that would violate international agreements the U.S. has adhered to since the 1980s. The New Republic.
Oddly enough this involves both climate change, which he denies because there’s one tin-hat wearing scientist somewhere or other who says it isn’t real, and his beloved shape-shifting wall.
Trump’s first assignment is to read The Washington Post today: An ancient border wall inspired the ‘Game of Thrones’ barrier in Trump’s meme. Does it hold any lessons?
When President Trump tweeted out a meme of his envisioned steel-slat wall with the words, “THE WALL IS COMING” over the weekend, many fans of “Game of Thrones” accused the president of never actually watching the hit HBO series.
Emperor Hadrian (whose walls inspired the author of the books “Game of Thrones” was based on) who ruled from A.D. 117 to A.D. 138, sounds like a guy Trump would have liked to play golf with. He was the first great wall builder in Western civilization — “no one built border walls to the extent Hadrian did,” Frye said. He built more than one great wall. He built other less impressive walls everywhere, on three continents, seeking to harden the Roman Empire’s borders rather than continue expanding them, as his predecessor, Trajan, had done.
In his 2018 book “Hadrian’s Wall,” British historian Adrian Goldsworthy described the emperor and his obsession with big-ticket construction like this: “The initial design for Hadrian’s Wall was grand, if not as grand as it would become, and this is an indication of the emperor’s personal involvement. Hadrian was obsessed with architecture and loved designing great buildings, a passion reflected in his rebuilding of the Pantheon in Rome, with its spectacular domed roof, and in his sprawling villa complex at Tivoli. The Wall was more functional, but it made up for this in sheer size.”
Now he should read “Think Progress” which will explain to him that…
A 1970 U.S.-Mexico treaty shows why Trump’s border wall is absurd
“Barriers built in the Rio Grande floodplain will either wash away during floods or become dams that worsen the flooding.”
The following includes information and short excerpts from the “Think Progress” article:
Record-breaking flooding events increased over the past 30 years according to the National Climate Assessment along the Texas/Mexico border and that extreme flooding events are only going to get worse. However the the 1970 “Treaty to Resolve Pending Boundary Differences and Maintain the Rio Grande and Colorado River as the International Boundary” was signed before climate change became an issue.
I doubt Trump has ever heard of the U.S.-Mexico International Boundary and Water Commission (IBWC) and knows that it “must approve construction of works proposed in either country” along the Rio Grande River. It explicitly prohibits the construction of projects “which, in the judgment of the commission, may cause deflection or obstruction of the normal flow of the river or of its flood flows.”
The Arizona Daily Star reported in 2008, a 5-mile border fence constructed along Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument’s southern border “became a dam” during a flash flood that year.
These images taken in 2008 from NASA’s Terra satellite show what happens when a barrier is built that has to withstand floods along the Rio Grande.
Sorry, President Trump, not only is it unwise and unnecessary to build a wall along the entire border, it is impossible.
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