On New Year's Eve, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to rant about his border wall and ended up contradicting himself on the subject of funding the wall in tweets just 11 minutes apart.
First, the president repeated his dubious claim that "Mexico is paying for the wall..."
And then proceeded to excoriate Democrats for not funding the wall...
He capped off the criticisms with the following tweet.
"Throughout the ages some things NEVER get better and NEVER change. You have Walls and you have Wheels. It was ALWAYS that way and it will always be that way!" he wrote, in part.
So how will the wall be funded? The president's contradictions did not slip past the eagle eyes of Twitter.
The government has been in a partial shutdown since Trump opted not to sign a stopgap funding bill which would have avoided a shutdown but did not allocate the $5 billion in funds he’d demanded for his proposed wall on the U.S.-Mexico border. The government shutdown is the third of Trump’s presidency. It will likely not be resolved until Democrats are sworn in tomorrow.
The president had long pledged to shut down the government if it doesn’t receive the funds he needs for the border wall, though he has offered conflicting messages on how the wall would be funded.
During the presidential campaign, for example, then-candidate Trump insisted Mexico would pay for the wall.
After winning the election, the president changed his tune.
He later claimed that the U.S. budget would pay for the wall…
…before shifting the burden back to Mexico.
Soon, he claimed that Congress should pay for the wall.
Mere days later, he claimed that Congress had agreed to fund the wall.
This obviously isn’t true, and the president made no mention of this year’s spending bill, which allocates $38 million for “border barrier planning and design” but doesn’t fund the wall itself.
