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ICYMI: NY Times Editorials Blast “Extreme Foolishness” of Trump’s Extreme Vetting and Border Wall Proposals

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New York Times editorials from today and this past weekend blast two of the administration’s signature policy proposals: Trump’s extreme vetting proposal for foreign visitors to the U.S., and the wall that Trump promises to build at the U.S.-Mexico border.

While the Times is referring to the border wall when it writes “[it is] an idiotic idea that started life as an applause line,” the same description could also be assigned to the latest “extreme vetting” proposal.

Below, we excerpt both Times editorials:

New York Times editorial: “The Foolishness in Trump’s Extreme Vetting Proposals”

Imagine that the next time you arrive at a foreign airport a customs agent asks you to unlock your phone, hand it over and, for good measure, cough up the login and password information for any social media accounts you have. You could then wait for hours while government officials sift through your address book, your emails, your chats and, yes, even your photos. If all goes well, you get your phone back, get a new stamp on your passport and start your journey with the sinking feeling that follows an arbitrary breach of privacy.

If some Trump administration officials have their way, this Orwellian scenario could soon become commonplace for visitors to the United States. That has the potential to fundamentally alter global travel, take a toll on America’s tourism industry, and subject United States citizens to tit-for-tat measures when they travel overseas.

No one has made a convincing case that such forms of enhanced screening would make the United States any safer. In fact, the opposite is true.

…Putting aside privacy concerns, there are major problems with this proposal. For starters, significant resources would be needed to carry it out, and taxpayers would have to provide those resources. Second, it would be easy for travelers with malicious intent to avert detection by carrying decoy phones or by deleting any questionable content on their devices before traveling.

New York Times editorial, “Up Against the Wall”

A. By the way, if you want to know if a wall works, just ask Israel. Israel built a wall and it works.

Q. And they heave rockets over it.

A. Yeah, I know. Well, no. Now they’re doing the rockets, yeah. That’s a — they have a — they have a different — they probably have a bigger — they have a different kind of a problem. You have to build a real wall. They don’t have a real wall right now. They don’t have a wall that works.

Did you get that?

1. There’s a wall in Israel and it works.
2. But it doesn’t work.

If you are confused, it’s probably your fault, because you are not Donald Trump, master builder, president of the United States and source of the quotation above, from an interview with The Times’s editorial board before the election.

Mr. Trump has always said stuff like this, things that are self-contradictory or untrue or breathtakingly mindless. It didn’t matter so much back when he was just a rich guy who liked to share his opinions with the world the way some people talk at the TV.

But now he is in the Oval Office, and the stuff he says is treated differently. A lot of it blows away, but some stuff actually happens. Things roost in his brain and come out of his mouth and Twitter feed, and before you know it, the federal government is taking proposals for Mr. Trump’s great border wall with Mexico. Hundreds of companies are expressing interest, preparing designs, creating renderings. Finalists are to be announced in June. Prototypes will then be built. It seems certain that millions or billions of dollars will be wasted, and miles of desert despoiled, before somebody someday pulls the plug.

… The libertarians at Reason magazine have a fine summation of why the wall won’t work. If only Mr. Trump would read it, or ponder these questions:

How do you build a wall along the 1,200 miles of the Rio Grande, the Texas stretch of border? Do you put it on our side and abandon the river to Mexico, or seize Mexican territory for it, or put it in the middle of the river, or do some zigzag compromise? What do you do then about a treaty requiring that both countries have open access to the river? How do you make a concrete wall see-through, so smugglers aren’t invisible to the Border Patrol? How do you get private landowners to go along? What about the Tohono O’odham Indians, whose reservation straddles the border in Arizona and who want no part of any wall on their sacred land? What happens when parts of the great wall become a great dam, trapping floodwaters and debris, and collapse? How do you wall out deep tunnels, drones and catapults? What about the tons of drugs that pass through existing ports? Did you know that drug cartels have ships and submarines? What happens when drug bales start coming ashore in San Diego, or over from Saskatchewan? Not that you care, but how do you build a wall that doesn’t scar fragile wilderness and destroy wildlife? How do you avoid causing more human deaths when a partly walled border sends migrants to more remote and deadly stretches of desert? Do you realize that a wall would trap millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States? Or that a large percentage of them come here legally, through ports of entry, with valid visas, and never go near the border?

It’s too bad these and other questions weren’t considered before the wall began taking shape. It has been a remarkable journey for an idiotic idea that started life as an applause line, as Mr. Trump admitted to The Times.

“If my speeches ever get a little off,” he said, “I just go: ‘We will build a wall!’ You know, if it gets a little boring, if I see people starting to sort of maybe thinking about leaving — I can sort of tell the audience — I just say, ‘We will build the wall,’ and they go nuts. ‘And Mexico will pay for the wall!’ But — ah, but I mean it. But I mean it.”

In other words:

1. The wall is a decoy, a fake, a lie.
2. But he means it.

Did you get that?