But Trump's public case for the wall has collapsed entirely, and much of the rest of the political system has rejected it, boxing him into a political corner with no escape. That's the emergency. A woman takes pictures as birds sit along a rusted top section of the border wall near Tijuana, Mexico. Credit:AP The formal declaration of a national emergency, allowing him a shot at building it unilaterally, might end up being the only way of bailing out the wall - and with it, bailing out himself. We know all of this to be the case, because the basic facts are all out there confirming it, but it's all so saturated in madness and bad faith that we grope for ways to convey it faithfully. The big story, which is everywhere for all to see, is that Trump and his advisers cannot justify the wall as Trump envisions it in any remotely credible way; that this is becoming harder to mask with lies; and that for Trump Nation, this really is an emergency.

Are there any internal studies justifying the wall? Promises to keep - even if they're not based in reality. Supporters hold up signs as the wait to hear President Donald Trump speak at a campaign rally in Florida in November. Credit:AP On January 25, 2017, Trump signed an executive order about immigration and the border that directed the Department of Homeland Security to "produce a comprehensive study of the security of the southern border, to be completed within 180 days." This study must explain how to "achieve complete operational control over the border." Where is this study? Does it justify the wall? Does it assess how effective a wall might be to achieve that aim? Does it explain where precisely it must be built, and how, in order to do so? I asked a DHS official about the whereabouts and content of this study. The official told me that the study has been completed, but that it hasn't been publicly released because it's "law enforcement sensitive."

Loading If this is so, then this should give us another good way to assess the administration's case for the wall. House Democrats can use their oversight authority to review this study, and while they may be constrained from revealing its precise details, they can characterise whether it comes anywhere near making a credible case for the wall. If not, that will make the shutdown look even more like a figment of Trump's political imperatives and megalomania than it already does. The White House's latest spending request demands something very precise: 234 miles (376 km) of wall. Does any internal administration study make a credible case for 234 miles of wall? Democrats have requested documentation justifying the wall, so they will eventually be able to speak to this point as well. The backdrop for all this is the sheer flimsiness of the administration's public arguments:

- NBC's Julia Ainsley just reported that administration data shows that authorities only encountered six people on a government terrorist watch list at ports of entry, seemingly contradicting the White House's recent claim that this numbers in the thousands. - Ainsley's report also notes that DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen claims the exact number of those suspect border-crossers is classified, but that she hopes to make it public. Thus, the administration is making claims while secure in the knowledge that classification prevents those claims from being backed up. The same is likely true of the "law enforcement sensitive" report noted above. - Underscoring that point, a former senior counterterrorism official writes that if the administration had internal info portraying a terrorism crisis at the border, it would very likely have declassified some of it already. This hasn't happened. - The White House recently released the briefing on the border that officials gave to Congress. It was full of falsehoods and absurdities, such as the claims that the wall is needed to stop drug smuggling (which misdiagnoses the problem) and that 17,000 people with criminal records have been arrested at the border (a dramatically mangled and misleading figure). - A recent media report included this: "White House aides acknowledge privately that a wall will not adequately address the record surge of immigrant families at the border - most of whom surrender to authorities in hopes of winning asylum protections." Trump has lied and lied about asylum seekers to justify the wall, but it won't address that crisis, which is a humanitarian one.

- Incredibly, The Washington Post reports that Trump may declare a national emergency to build the wall in part because of "the wall's symbolic power for his core voters." The wall's "symbolic power" to Trump's "core voters" is key to why Trump keeps insisting on it. But the corollary to this is that the collapsing case for it - and the possibility that it might not get built - is itself an emergency of sorts. You can't watch Fox News without grasping the force of this looming threat. In this sense, you can draw a direct line from a popular explanation for Trump's victory - the "Calamity Thesis" - right through to the present moment. The "Calamity Thesis," as Adam Serwer describes it, is the idea that Trump's election was produced by "some great, unacknowledged social catastrophe" inflicted on working class whites that has been "ignored by cloistered elites in their coastal bubbles," be it demographic, cultural, or economic. Only he could fix it. Whether this is why Trump won is beside the point. Trump did campaign endlessly on the invocation of existential threats of all kinds. For untold numbers in Trump's base, particularly white evangelical Christians, the need for a wall has become a symbol of a kind of rolling extinction event and of Trump's ability to defend them from it. However many people do or do not believe this, Trump plainly thinks there are a lot of them out there. If Trump declares a national emergency to build the wall, it might or might not work.