David A. Graham: No one listens to the president

Fisher is a curious choice. The company is already suing the government after being rejected for any Army Corps contract for the border wall. Fisher was one of the companies that participated in a prototype exercise outside San Diego in 2017, but the company’s wall didn’t meet the specifications laid out by the Department of Homeland Security, which wanted a wall that agents could see through. Instead, Fisher pushed a more expensive, concrete wall, similar to the one that Trump promised during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the Fisher prototype was late and over budget. The CEO, Tommy Fisher, criticized the steel-bollard design that the government chose. Now Fisher is promising a steel wall, and it says it can build one cheaper and faster than any other contractor.

Fisher Industries has some assets, though. Tommy Fisher is a major GOP donor. He has North Dakota’s Republican Senator Kevin Cramer in his corner. He’s already working on a private-sector attempt to build a barrier on private land in New Mexico, which is backed by close Trump allies such as Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist; Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater and brother of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos; and Kris Kobach, the former vice chair of Trump’s voter-fraud commission, who was under consideration as his “immigration czar.”

Moreover, Tommy Fisher has wisely made himself a fixture on Fox News, which the president watches obsessively. He’s used those appearances to pitch his company’s plan. And in a statement to the Post, Fisher Industries struck a positively Trumpian tone, promising to build “faster than any contractor using common construction methods” and adding, “Consistent with the goals President Trump has also outlined, Fisher’s goal is to, as expeditiously as possible, provide the best-quality border protection at the best price for the American people at our nation’s border.”

David A. Graham: Trump’s border obsession is courting disaster

There are valid critiques of the Army Corps contract process. Like many government contracting processes, it can be sclerotic and award contracts to a crew of the usual suspects, firms that are geared not toward speed and efficiency but toward box checking. But it should be self-evident that the answer to fixing a troubled process is not for the president of the United States to personally intervene and pressure military leaders to award a contract to a specific company, controlled by a political ally, which has repeatedly failed to meet the standards laid out for the process.

Trump’s obsession with Fisher is a triumph for the company. Even as Fisher has failed to follow guidelines and changed its vision of the wall, it continues to insist it can magically do the job better and faster than anyone else. These sort of pie-in-the-sky claims, in any realm, should raise alarm bells. They do not for Trump, for a couple of reasons. First, the president has demonstrated time and again that despite his self-styled reputation as a genius negotiator, he is actually a pushover who is easily swayed.