Donald Trump has threatened to keep the government shut down for months, or even years, until he is allowed to build the Wall. The threat is typical of Trump’s government by tantrum, in which he rules by promising to cut off his nose to spite his face—or, as we say in Russian, “to freeze my ears off to spite my mother,” an expression that invokes the more-fitting image of a teen-ager. Trump’s latest fit tells us little new about the President. But it does provide a new measure of the place of the Wall, or, more and more frequently, simply “Wall,” in our politics.

I first noticed the use of “Wall” without an article in a December 12th press release from the Department of Homeland Security titled “Walls Work.” This remarkable document appeared to be a cross between a war dispatch and a contractor’s sales pitch. It referenced both the Wall and “miles of border wall,” which seemed to turn the Wall from a physical object into a substance. A couple of weeks later, Trump told reporters that he “gave out a hundred and fifteen miles’ worth of wall” in Texas and promised, “We are going to have great wall there.” Wall was definitely losing its articles.

On December 27th, Trump tweeted that in Israel the wall “works 99.9%.” I happened to be driving on Israeli roads that day. There was Wall everywhere—a lot more Wall, it seemed, than when I last visited, a year and a half ago. In one place the wall appeared to run not only along the road but also perpendicular to itself, forming a T-shape. The wall walled everything off from everywhere. Every side of the wall was the other side of the wall. This was Wall as a substance, not an object—as a malignancy that would expand until it choked the body that produced it.

This may be what Trump means, after a fashion, when he says that the Israeli wall works. We know enough to know that he doesn’t actually know anything about the Israeli wall, but he and the Israeli premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, are kindred spirits. Their love of Wall is infinite, like the wall itself. Of course it would be wall that would supplant what used to be politics and shut down the machinery of the American state.

Trump loves the Wall and hates the government: these were the cornerstones of his election campaign and form the foundation of his world view. (The Times on Saturday reported that Trump’s campaign advisers used the Wall as “a mnemonic device” to help him remember to talk tough on immigration.) Shutting down the government in perpetuity is one way to “drain the swamp.” Wall becomes a lid that covers the swamp and suffocates it.

Declaring a national emergency would be another way to use Wall to choke America. Trump apparently imagines that such a move would allow him to govern the way he thinks he wants to: by barking commands rather than by throwing tantrums. Technically, he probably wouldn’t need to declare a national emergency—there are thirty states of emergency effective in the U.S. right now, many of them in effect for many years. (Presidents renew states of emergency annually, and though Congress is legally required to meet every six months to reassess a state of emergency, this has not happened since the relevant law was passed, in 1976.) States of emergency have already been used to enable grievous violations of people’s rights—as, for example, when the state of emergency declared after 9/11 (and renewed every year since) was used to make it possible to torture people captured in a war that had nothing to do with the attacks. In other words, Trump may not even need a new state of emergency to claim extraordinary Wall-related powers, but in his imagination he can create a national emergency that’s all Wall all the time.

Like all things imagined by Trump, Wall sets a trap. People who think of themselves as reasonable relentlessly point out that much of the Wall already exists, that building more Wall would not be an effective barrier against people trying to enter the country. This argument sets aside the fundamental immorality of the effort. The more thoughtful commentators note that people who have been trying to enter the country recently are asylum seekers, who wish to present themselves to American authorities rather than try to live in the U.S. without official status. Sometimes these commentators even remember that the right to seek asylum is guaranteed by international law with no requirement that asylum seekers enter at so-called ports of entry—the holes in the Wall that Trump and his D.H.S. want to plug up. But all of these arguments miss the point, because they address the issue of a physical wall rather than the immeasurable substance of Wall, which envelops all of us now.