The Daily - Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018

Episode Date: January 23, 2018

President Trump’s plan to build a “big, beautiful wall” between the United States and Mexico has become the ultimate symbol of a hard-line immigration policy. So why, as Congress voted to end a government shutdown and take up the issue of immigration, have Democrats suggested that they would agree to fund the wall if Republicans protect the Dreamers?Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the president's border wall has stood as the ultimate symbol of a hardline approach to immigration, built on keeping people out. So why, as Congress votes to end a shutdown and take up the issue of immigration, have Democrats suggested that if Republicans protect the Dreamers, they would fund the wall? It's Tuesday, January 23rd. Julie, where does the idea of a border wall between the United States and Mexico come from? Well, the idea of border security has been a part of the immigration conversation for a long time.

Julie Davis covers the White House for The Times. conversation for a long time. Julie Davis covers the White House for The Times. But for Donald Trump, he started actually thinking about this even before he decided to jump into the presidential race, when a couple of his advisors said that they thought it would be good for him to start talking about the idea of a border wall. You know, they talk about, oh, I don't know, how could we possibly build a fence that nobody can climb over? I would build a border like you've never seen before.

Nobody's climbing over. And he started testing it out. We have to build a fence. Early in 2014, he said something along the lines of, I would build a border fence like you've never seen before. And the crowd liked it, and he got kind of a warm response. Fences are easy, believe me. But then he started actually talking about a wall. And I would build a wall like nobody can build a wall. And nobody comes in illegally anymore. When he started to talk about

a wall and a strong wall, a solid wall, he found it was even more powerful. And it began to be a staple of all of his speeches to political audiences. And I would build the greatest wall you have ever seen. And then, of course, he really hit it hard in his announcement speech for his campaign. I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me. And it became a rallying cry at rallies around the country when his presidential campaign got underway. Build that wall. We're going to build that wall. Don't worry about it.

And he used to say privately that when he felt like a crowd was starting to lag or lose some energy or he really needed like a big applause line, he would start talking about the wall and people would just eat it up. We will build a wall. And if you listen to the response at some of these rallies, We will 100% build the wall. He was really right. And the more he said it and the more it got a rise out of Democrats and the left. This is just one more example of something that is not thought through and is primarily put forward for political consumption. He would double down on that and people ate it up even more. Donald Trump wants to build a wall.

Secretary Clinton wants to put together a pathway for success, for citizenship, for 11 million folks. Is that important to you? Democrats around the country start talking about how awful this concept is of a wall and building barriers between our country and other countries. We believe that Black Lives Matter and that we won't build Donald Trump's stupid wall. And Hillary Clinton starts to ridicule the idea.

We build bridges, not walls. And at this point, Donald Trump has started to talk about Mexico is going to pay for the wall, and she shoots down that idea. By the way, Mexico's not paying for his wall either. If he ever tries to get it built, the American taxpayer will pay for it. And so for the Democrats, it becomes a symbol of everything that they criticize about Trump.

For him, it's all about walls. It's not about that for us. And that became a real point of contrast for the Democrats. I'm pleased that you all are here to witness the signature of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. You have to remember that Hillary Clinton and actually many Senate Democrats voted in 2006 for some pretty elaborate fencing at the border. For months, Democrats and Republicans have been working together to pass a comprehensive immigration bill out of this Congress. And so that's something that Hillary Clinton had been in favor of. Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama had voted in favor of it. And this was around the time when they were talking about a broader immigration compromise.

Because we know that in addition to greater border security, we also need greater sanctions on employers who hire people in this country illegally. But now you have a Republican candidate, Donald Trump, who's talking about a wall and who's made it about this physical solid barrier that has become a symbol of a very exclusionary immigration policy. And so all of a sudden,

that's not something Democrats want to agree to anymore. It's not something they want to be seen as in any way supportive of. And so you effectively sort of removed the entire conversation about, well, what is prudent border security? Because all Donald Trump is talking about is a wall. Is that how Trump himself saw the wall as more of a symbol and a metaphor? Or did he actually want to build a physical wall along the border with Mexico? It's an interesting question. I think he was enamored with the idea of it, with the imagery

of it. He also, frankly, didn't have very and still does not have very detailed understanding of the policy issues on immigration. But a wall, he could understand. And he would even say at some of his rallies, I'm a builder, I know how to build things. It was sort of a comfortable place for him to be as a person who didn't understand the nuances of immigration policy, didn't much care to do any sort of detailed research into how you actually get to a comprehensive immigration bill. He got himself to a place where he really couldn't let go of it. himself to a place where he really couldn't let go of it. So President Trump is elected, in part, you could argue, because of the promise that he would build this wall. And this is a moment when people begin to wonder to what extent his campaign rhetoric is just rhetoric and to what

extent it's real. And the president signals early on that he's serious in all kinds of ways when it comes to immigration. There's the travel ban. He cracks down on deportations and detainments of undocumented immigrants. What happens, though, with the wall? Does he actually try to get the wall built? Well, beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders, gets back its borders. Early on, he issues an executive order in which he says. The secretary of Homeland Security, working with myself and my staff, will begin immediate construction of a border wall. In immediate construction of a border wall. And we all looked at this executive order and we're paging through all the pages.

And where is the part where he orders this wall and requests appropriations or money to spend to actually begin building this wall? And it's nowhere. Because he and his advisers have realized that you actually need Congress to provide the money to build a wall. And Republicans in Congress signal that this is not high on their priority list. They have a lot of things to do to keep the government running. And, you know, allocating billions of dollars for a border wall is just not at the top of their list. So the logistics of turning this very successful campaign symbol into a governing reality turns out to be very complicated. Right. And that becomes apparent the first time the president has to sign a bill to keep the government funded in the spring of 2017. President Trump will mark his 100th day in office this week. But first, he'll need to work with Congress to keep the government funded. And the issue of who will fund the border wall could be holding things up.

Trump tweeting this morning, quote, the Democrats don't want money from budget going to border wall, despite the fact that it will stop drugs and very bad MS-13 gang members. And the president has said he wants money in that package for the beginnings of a border wall. One of the things holding up the spending bill was the president's insistence on funding for the southern border wall. Now he's given in.

And when it comes down to it, Mitch McConnell cuts a deal with Democrats that does not include funding for a border wall, not even one cent for a border wall. The game of chicken between the White House and Democrats over government funding ended before it began. And the president has to swallow that and sign it.

That's right. In the end, it was a choice between fighting for that border wall funding and risking a government shutdown. And the White House blinks. Why is that? Why don't congressional Republicans want to fund this wall? Is it because it's too objectionable to Democrats to stand any chance of making it into something as urgent as a budget bill? Well, a few reasons. One of the reasons is that a wall of the kind that Trump was proposing is extremely expensive. This is supposed to be the party of fiscal restraint. They're talking about spending caps and we have to pare back and reining in the deficit and the debt. And so the idea of pouring billions of dollars into something like this is not particularly appealing to them. It might be if they thought

it was practical, but even Republicans in Congress will tell you that they don't particularly think that one long physical barrier along the border is the way to go. And so they can't see their way clear to sticking hundreds of millions or billions of dollars into this budget bill for a wall when it's not clear that that's going to yield the kind of results that they want to see. And how are Democrats in Congress reacting to the president trying to get this funding for the wall into the budget. Look, Democrats have always been for border security. We just think the wall made no sense. Well, from the very beginning, they said that it was a nonstarter. And we're not going to allow

any dollars in any kind of border security appropriation to be used for a wall, period. One of the things that they did after the budget deal was reached and there was no money for the wall in it was they crowed about it. And it really got under Trump's skin. And this is the line that people are talking about. Our country needs a good shutdown in September to fix mess. The president of the United States just called for a government shutdown. And it got under the skin of a lot of his aides at the White House who were trying to sort of explain away the fact that they just accepted a budget deal that didn't have wall funding in it. But really, he lost some face, you know, and the White House had to figure out what to do about that. So the Trump administration is at this point trying to save face because they're not getting the wall that they want.

So how exactly do they do that? Good afternoon. Another busy day here at the White House. It got kind of crazy and absurd in the White House briefing room one day when Sean Spicer, the press secretary. So if I can get a quick the first image up. Brought out these photographs of fencing and all sorts of barriers at the border. And this is what exists right now throughout our country. Went through all these pictures and said, you see. There are various types of walls that can be built.

Under the legislation that was just passed, it allows us to do that. This is called a bollard wall. We get this in the bill. This is called. A levy wall on the left. So that's not a wall. It's a levy wall. That's what it's actually called.

And there was an exchange between him and the reporter from Breitbart, which has been very strong on demanding the wall and demanding wall funding. No, no. In this current bill. Where the reporter's kind of incredulous, like you're calling that a wall? And Spicer's saying, well, it's a bollard wall. And that's, that's, bollard wall is a wall. We have what was in the first slide. What we've done is taken the tools that we have to replace. And if you look at it was very clear beginning then and has become clear in the months since that, you know, the quote unquote wall is not necessarily a big poured concrete cement wall like Donald Trump talked about on the campaign trail. They're very subtly and slowly moving toward, well, a wall could be a fence. A wall could include surveillance. A wall is not necessarily what people thought a wall was going to look like.

The president said he was going to build a wall and he's doing it. He's using the best technology and what the Department of Homeland Security, under Secretary John Kelly, says is the most effective way to keep people out, to stop drugs, to stop cartels. This gets to something that John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff, talked about privately with some Democratic lawmakers and then later publicly in an interview last week, which is that... Campaign to governing are two different things, and this president is very, very flexible in terms of what is within the realm of the possible. It's one thing to campaign for president, and it's another thing to be president.

And Trump, essentially, he said, had to be educated on this. You know, there's been an evolutionary process that this president has gone through as a campaign, and I pointed out to all of the members that were in the room that they all say things during the course of campaigns that may or may not be fully informed. And he's evolved, he said, on the issue of a wall and now understands what, frankly, Kelly was saying early on when he was nominated to be the Homeland Security Secretary at his hearings that... If you were to build a wall from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, you'd still have to

back that wall up with patrolling by human beings, by sensors, by observation devices. It's not going to look the way a wall might indicate. It's going to look like very sophisticated technology, fencing, see-through barriers, and the like. That's fascinating in what it tells us about the politics of the wall, that even John Kelly, who's the former Homeland Security secretary and who we're now talking about as this figure who is pushing the president to the right on the issue of immigration, that he's saying, well, it's not really a wall, folks. Right. And you also have Democrats who have basically acknowledged since late last year that they may have to accept some level of border security beyond maybe what they're comfortable with in order to get some progress on the issues they care about, like protections for DREAMers and a broader immigration compromise later on. And what they say privately, and in some cases publicly to the president's aides, is, you want us to call it a wall? We can call it a wall. But this has to be part of a larger negotiation. And what is clear is that the people around the president who are pushing a restrictive line on immigration have decided that the wall or fencing or border security, however you want to put it, is not enough for them.

So it sounds like what you're describing is the background and the backdrop to what happened on Friday in this meeting between Chuck Schumer and President Trump. The president said many times he would take a deal that included DACA in exchange for the wall. I put that deal on the table in the Oval Office in a sincere effort at compromise. The fact that the Senate Democratic leader

is willing to fund the wall and make that part of the negotiation, I think that came as a huge surprise to most people. It seemed like the ultimate reversal for the Democrats. Right. Except that you have to remember that we're in a period now where the Democrats feel like they're very close, perhaps on the brink of getting the president to agree to a broader immigration deal that they have long been pressing for. And this is a way of the Democrats putting it to the president. If you really want this deal, which we really want, we'll give you something that you really

want that, P.S., we've actually voted for versions of many years ago to get it done. I mean, you had one prominent Democrat on the House side, Luis Gutierrez, say. But if that's what it's going to take to take 800,000 young men and women and give them a chance to live freely and openly in America, then I'll roll up my sleeves. I'll go down there with bricks and mortar and begin the walk. They're essentially saying this wall was always ridiculous. It was always something that we didn't support.

But if you want to talk about border security in exchange for what we consider a good immigration deal, we'll do that. And that can be the debate that we have. And it feels like what we're learning about Democrats is that it's far more objectionable and frustrating for them to negotiate away major elements of American immigration policy than it is to give away the wall. take on this huge symbolic significance during the campaign and during the first year of Trump's presidency. But the wall was never a policy.

And now that they're in a negotiation over what the real policy looks like, I think both sides are trying to get to a place where they can put that to one side and figure out what they're both really willing to do. And so that brings us to Monday. And good evening tonight from Washington. We are here in the nation's capital because of the government shutdown. Today was day three. And then Senate Democrats deciding to give in on the dreamers with the promise from Senate Republicans that they'll take up the issue soon. Congress has just voted for this temporary funding bill with an agreement that they will have a full debate on immigration in the coming days. How should we think about this debate and what's likely to happen in this debate

in light of what you've just told us about the real significance of the wall? Where we are now is that it's very clear that President Trump and Democrats are going to spend the next three weeks getting into the nitty-gritty of immigration policy and that the simple, stark reality of the wall is not going to be the dominant issue. It's going to be all of these other complicated issues that they never even really touched in the campaign and certainly not in this negotiation that led us to today. So we're finally going to have the complicated immigration reform debate that in many ways the wall sort of precluded up until now.

It seems like we will. The wall is clearly going to continue to be an element here, but there's a lot more to a compromise on immigration than just Donald Trump's wall. Thank you, Julie. Always a pleasure, Michael. On Monday afternoon, the Senate, then the House, passed a short-term spending bill to reopen the government and keep it funded through February 8th. Democrats joined Republicans in voting for the measure

in exchange for a promise from Republican leaders that Congress would continue to negotiate a so-called global agreement on immigration that would include the fate of the Dreamers. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. I have represented the United States of America in two Olympics and have done so successfully. And both USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee have been very quick to capitalize and celebrate my success.

But did they reach out when I came forward? No. After days of emotional testimony from female athletes, the organization that governs gymnastics in the U.S. announced that its chairman and several board members had resigned over their handling of sexual assault accusations against a team doctor. I am here to face you, Larry,

so you can see I've regained my strength, that I'm no longer a victim, I'm a survivor. After Dr. Lawrence Nassar pleaded guilty to molesting at least seven girls, dozens of gymnasts, including U.S. gold medalist Ali Raisman, stood up and recounted their experience at his sentencing hearing. I was the innocent nine-year-old with a broken pelvis that was willing

to trust and allow the doctor to do anything to help it feel better. You convinced my parents that you didn't pull my feet into your lap, unzip your pants, and rub your erect penis against my bare skin. Now I get flashbacks when I see male hands, and it makes me feel scared and threatened. You used my body for six years for your own sexual gratification. In their testimonies, Raisman and other female athletes had challenged USA Gymnastics to explain how so many women could have suffered this abuse for so many years. USA Gymnastics, where is the honesty? Where is the transparency? Why must the manipulation continue?

That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.