The Senate on Tuesday passed a short-term spending bill that would keep the government running through Dec. 7, aiming to put off a fight over funding for President Trump’s border wall until after the midterm elections. The short-term bill came attached to a massive budget package containing full-year 2019 funding for the Pentagon as well as for the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education departments. GOP leaders designed the package to combine key Republican and Democratic priorities in an attempt to garner overwhelming bipartisan support. The package also aims to satisfy Trump’s desire for more military spending.

Which leads me to wonder: How is Trump going to explain to his supporters in 2020 how he failed to fulfill the central promise of his 2016 campaign?

The border wall was the central promise, make no mistake. It was the thing that most distinguished him from his primary opponents, and it carried enormous symbolic weight for what he called “the forgotten men and women” as they flocked to the polls that November. It wasn’t just about stopping illegal immigration, either. It was about stopping cultural change, as well as healing the sense of diminishment so many people felt. Perhaps most important, it was about seizing back a sense of agency and power. When Trump told them that not only would we build a wall, but that we would force Mexico to pay for it, they cheered.

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The United States, Trump said, was constantly being laughed at, ridiculed and taken advantage of by the rest of the world. Well, now, we would make Mexico kneel before us and suffer the humiliation of opening its wallet to pay for a wall it would hate. If life has made you feel small and weak, here was a chance for us all to feel big and strong.

It is now two years later, and it turns out that not only is Mexico never going to pay for a wall, even Republicans in Congress don’t want it. It’s not that they dislike the idea, they just think it is more political trouble than it is worth, especially given that polls show nearly 60 percent of Americans oppose it. So they keep putting it off, telling Trump that they’ll eventually get around to it — just not right now.

And Trump himself doesn’t seem to want to force the issue either. He has threatened many times to shut down the government if he doesn’t get funding for his wall but, every time, he backs down. And what happens if Democrats take control of the House after November’s midterms, as just about everyone assumes they will? Future budgets will have to be bipartisan, which means no wall.

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So what will Trump do? One option would be to simply proclaim that in fact, the wall is well underway. He does this regularly, whenever he’s at one of his rallies. “A lot of people don’t know it but we’ve already started the wall,” he said at one last month in Tampa. “We’ve started large portions of the wall, but we’re going to need, even the way we negotiate, we’re going to need more and we’re going to get more, and we may have to do some pretty drastic things, but we’re going to get it.”

Those “drastic things” would presumably include forcing a shutdown, which is, of course, not going to happen. As for the claim that Trump has already started building the wall, that’s false. There has been some money spent on shoring up existing fencing at various points along the border, but nothing like Trump’s vision of a wall stretching from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico.

If he can’t fool anyone into believing the wall actually exists, the other option is to blame Democrats for its absence and keep saying we have to build it, which is what he’s likely to do. But imagine it’s 2020, and you’re one of those voters who liked the idea so much in 2016. When the “Build that wall!” chant starts, are you going to join in as lustily as you did back then?

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You might. Or you might say to yourself, “Hey wait a minute. Trump has had four years, and there’s no wall. Why should I believe he’s going to get it done in the next four years?”