The Psychology of the Great Wall of Trump vs Jeb’s “Can’t Do” Cuckservatism

James Kirkpatrick
VDARE
August 31, 2015

Admit it, you want to see it built
Admit it, you want to see it built

Mincing cuckservative Jeb Bush is at it again, taking his can’t do attitude to the people.

“What Donald Trump is proposing is a wall that can’t be built,” Bush said in a Sunday radio interview with John Catsimatidis on New York’s AM 970…

However, immediately after Bush declared a wall can’t be built, he also contradicted himself by saying construction of a wall would cost “billions.”

“If it was [built], it would cost hundreds of billions of dollars,” he insisted.

Bush’s calculations predict that each mile of border fence would cost at least $100 million to construct.

[Jeb Bush’s border slogan: “We Can’t Do It,” by Neil Munro, Breitbart, August 30, 2015]

Author Munro, who appears to have migrated from the Daily Caller to Laura Ingraham’s Lifezette and now to Breitbart, adds deadpan:

It appears Bush may have exaggerated the cost of the wall that can’t be built. Experience shows that walls are much simpler to build than spaceships and rockets, nuclear weapons, or a huge military. In fact, the Government Accountability Office concluded in 2009 that the most ambitious border wall under consideration would cost $5.1 million per mile.

Why are the respectable Beltway Right types (what Breitbart’s John Nolte sarcastically calls the “GOP Smart Set”) so impressed with Jeb anyway? Objectively, he’s a terrible candidate. For all intents and purposes, he’s already given the Democrats the equivalent of Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment weeks ago when he stated his economic policy.

“It means that people need to work longer hours and, through their productivity, gain more income for their families. That’s the only way we’re going to get out of this rut that we’re in.”

[Jeb Bush: Americans ‘need to work longer hours,’ by Anthony Zurcher, BBC, July 9, 2015]

With that kind of rhetoric, Jeb probably couldn’t even beat Bernie Sanders.

It’s also worth keeping Jeb’s “can’t do it” comments in mind whenever he talks about the things we are supposed to believe we can do, like spread democracy around the world, fix American schools with or, for that matter, assimilate tens of millions of Third Worlders.

In contrast, Donald Trump portrays his wall not as a negative thing, but as a great national accomplishment. He calls for building a “wall, a big, beautiful, powerful wall.”

He even gets angry when people call it a “fence.”

This is a great example of “reframing” the debate, something cuckservatives never do. Rather than playing by their enemies’ terms and accepting their moral values, Trump flips the script.

All too often, open borders advocates and even some immigration patriots portray a wall as a surrender, as America “closing itself off” to the world. But Trump says it is the opposite. It’s an act of will, a statement from a people that we will not surrender our identity, we will not give away our country, and we are still capable of great collective action. The great American wall would be a symbol of American renewal and hope, that we can still do mighty things as a nation.

I don’t even care if he puts his name on it. After all, it would just be one more way to trigger Jorge Ramos.