Drug smugglers are being helped by the Democratic leaders in Congress who are trying to block funding for a border wall, says President Donald Trump.

He is using Twitter to hit the Democrats as enablers for the criminal gangs that are smuggling deadly drugs into American cities and towns around the nation, and which are sending murderous MS-13 gang members into Americans’ neighborhoods.

….the wall is not built, which it will be, the drug situation will NEVER be fixed the way it should be!#BuildTheWall — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 24, 2017

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. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2017

The strategy makes sense because it is true, and because many of the Americans who will vote in 2018 are increasingly concerned about the rising death toll from Mexican-supplied heroin and other drugs. In July 2016, Breitbart News reported:

Voters want safer communities as they see crime rates rising. The Opinion Research Corporation found that 58 percent of voters think politicians aren’t doing enough to keep drug traffickers off the streets, but only 30 percent thought we lock up drug traffickers for too long, a 2-to-1 margin. Remarkably, female respondents expressed much more support for stronger enforcement than men, with 62 percent of women (mothers, daughters, wives) saying not enough is done to keep traffickers far from their families — indicating a law and order agenda is an issue that can win over significant numbers of women voters. Middle and lower-class Americans’ crime worries have dramatically increased since Obama launched his “stigmatize-and-federalize” cops campaign: 68 percent of nonwhite respondents in a Gallup poll said they worried “a great deal” about crime, along with 53 percent of political independents. Cutting sentences for federal inmates is a bipartisan priority only in the Beltway — back in middle America, cracking down on crime unites diverse constituencies.

Other polls also show a growing public concern about drugs and crime.

In response, Democrats are saying Trump should get the Mexican government to pay for the wall up-front. Trump counters by saying Mexico will pay for the wall, but he will not delay construction of the wall until Mexico starts paying.

Eventually, but at a later date so we can get started early, Mexico will be paying, in some form, for the badly needed border wall. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 23, 2017

The Mexican government and many prominent Mexican leaders say they won’t pay for the wall, but the U.S. government has many means to extracting indirect payments, such as taxing illegal-aliens’ money sent via banking systems to relatives in Mexico. Another form of indirect payment is a reduction of Mexican aliens living in the United States, whose departure would reduce U.S. payments to families in Mexico and would also increase wages for Americans.

Democrats leaders are determined to stop the wall because it would symbolically and literally interdict the flow of cheap workers, welfare-aided consumers, and apartment renters in the Democratic-dominated upmarket cities on the coastlines. GOP leaders are not fighting for Trump’s wall, partly because their donors and local supports also want the cheap-labor inflow.

Democratic leaders are playing the role of victim in press conferences, and argue that Trump’s successful campaign promise to build a wall is actually a political “stunt” and a reckless “poison pill” which threatens to shut down government amid bipartisan budget negotiations. “The Democrats in the House and the Senate are ready to work and cooperate with the White House to keep the government open,” Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union. He continued:

But we told the president weeks ago, don’t try any political stunts, don’t put any poison pills into this process. Let’s just do the responsible important work of funding this government. We know what this wall is all about. This was a promise made by the president during his campaign. Don’t you remember he said the Mexicans were going to pay for it? Now we know it’s going to cost $20 to $70 billion for this wall. We have Democrats and Republicans all along the border opposing this deal. It’s a political stunt, an obsession for the president that should not shut down our government.

In backroom negotiations, Trump’s budget director is offering the Democrats $1 in Obamacare funding for every $1 that Democrats agree to spend on the wall. “We’ve finally boiled this negotiation down to something that we want very badly, that the Democrats really don’t like, and that’s the Border wall,” Mick Mulvaney told Bloomberg on Friday. He continued:

At the same time, there’s something they want very badly that we don’t like very much, which are these cost-sharing reductions of the Obamacare payments. Ordinarily, in a properly functioning Washington, DC, as in any business, this would be the basis upon which a negotiated resolution could be achieved. The question is, how much of our stuff do we have to get, how much of their stuff are they willing to take? And that’s the way it should work. That is the way that we hope that it works. We’d offer them one dollar of CSR payments for one dollar of wall payments. Right now, that’s the offer that we’ve given to our Democrat colleagues. … If the Democrats come back to us and say, ‘Look, we can’t do that, we can do this,’ that’s a really, really good sign, not only in the short-term, but in the long-term. If they simply walk away, and choose to not participate in the discussions, that’s a bad sign, not only in the short-term, but for the next several years.”

Each year, 4 million Americans turn 18 and enter the workforce, where they face job competition from roughly 1 million new temporary contract workers and 1 million legal immigrants, plus indirect competition from roughly 30 million unemployed working-age Americans who are sitting on the sidelines while immigrants drive down wages. But business groups want the government to keep importing additional people, who serve as cheap workers, welfare-aided consumers, and apartment renters.