On Sunday, Donald Trump confirmed that a part of the border wall in California fell into Mexico due to high winds, but also called reports of the incident “Fake News.”
“Last week the Fake News said that a section of our powerful, under construction, Southern Border Wall ‘fell over’, trying to make it sound terrible, except the reason was that the concrete foundation was just poured & soaking wet when big winds kicked in,” Trump wrote on Twitter with his trademark grammatical errors and unorthodox capitalization. “Quickly fixed ‘forever’.”
Here are the facts, which Trump seems to both confirm and deny.
On Jan. 29, high winds in Calexico, California, blew over a section of Trump’s border wall, causing it to fall into Mexico.
In an email the following day, Ralph DeSio, a Customs and Border Protection official, wrote that high winds “impacted a handful of panels,” adding that there were no injuries or property damage. DeSio said the concrete holding the wall was still drying, confirming the media’s reporting on the incident.
Texas-based company founded by Republican donors was awarded a multimillion-dollar contract to build the section of the border wall that blew over.
In a June 2019 press release, CPB said the company, named, SLSCO had been awarded an $88 million contract to replace an 11-mile section of dilapidated border wall in Calexico. According to a 2019 Forbes report, SLSCO has received contracts for border wall projects totaling almost half a billion dollars since Trump took office.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised Mexico would pay for a border wall. When Mexico refused, Trump resorted to taking money Congress allocated for military bases to use instead.
In 2019, the Trump administration took $3.6 billion meant for military bases and services for military families. In 2020, Trump is planning to divert an additional $3.8 billion away from the military to help fund the border wall.
Trump regularly accused the media of being “fake news” when reports are unfavorable to him or his administration. But in this case, Trump both accused media reports of being fake and confirmed the underlying facts of the reports.
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
