I don't know about @blue32, but Trump started his campaign (republican primaries) with the wall, and ended his campaign promising the wall. Pretty obvious to me he intended to build the wall. With the realities that it's physically impossible to build one continuous wall, due to geography (like a canyon or mountain or whatever), it's obvious he's not going to build one continuous wall. Certain people have made a mountain out that molehill ("he lied, he's not building one continuous wall!"), but I don't find his intent to have changed in the least. The wall thing is among the least likable things about Trump's program. I don't agree with him that immigrants are hurting the country economically or in any other way. If you paid attention to him, he was accusing the Mexican government of emptying its prisons and mental hospitals and sending those people here. I haven't seen evidence of that, but Castro did do that to us in the 70s.
I'm not generally a fan of trade wars, but tariffs are how the government used to be funded - well into the 1900s even. We get a lot of produce from Mexico and the automakers build cars there to sell here. A 20% tariff is going to make those things go up, or we can pay about the same for food grown here and cars made here. It's not really us who's going to feel the sting of this proposed tariff. It will almost certainly be Mexico. I also don't know if all the hate toward NAFTA is well founded. Seems to me Texas and California, both border states, are doing incredibly well.
I think mags said something like "the wall was only a metaphor for trumps call of Americanism and America first!"
