And just like that, the Wall vanished into thin air.

Of course, the Great Wall of Trump existed solely in the mind of the man who conned millions into believing in it in order to make him president. Among the hundreds of promises he made, "the big, beautiful wall" was his masterpiece. Now, it is gone with only the whimper of a president begging the military to pay for it now.

But there is absolutely zero chance of that. The Congress appropriates the funds under the Constitution and the Defense Department, under its own regulation, cannot simply spend them on something else without getting Congress to approve — all over again. The Wall was as metaphorical as it was imaginary, and now that it is dead, it is revealing a garden of campaign pledges so bountifully promised, dead.

The Wall was born on June 16, 2015 to much fanfare: "I will build a great wall ― and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me ― and I'll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Indeed, millions did.

In this March 13, 2018 file photo, President Donald Trump talks with reporters as he reviews border wall prototypes in San Diego. (Evan Vucci / AP)

They were whipped into a frenzy every time he boasted of his bouncing, new baby wall. It got bigger. It got higher, soaring 30 feet. At one point, it even sported a beautiful, giant door, allowing legal immigrants to pass but keeping out everyone and everything else. It was no matter that there was no illegal immigration crisis on the border — that had happened 15 years earlier — the Wall was the answer to all.

By the time of the election, 79 percent of Republicans wanted the Wall even if they had mixed opinions about everything else regarding immigration. Immediately after, though, the Wall began to have, as so many of Trump's projects, financing problems. In an interview with 60 Minutes, part of it became a fence. After his inauguration, he admitted that the Mexicans, in fact, had no intention of paying for the Wall, what they called El Muro. The Mexican government would not reimburse the American taxpayer.

But I'll work it out, he promised. Trump floated a 20 percent tariff on Mexican goods, which went nowhere. He begged his Mexican counterpart just to go along with him, to no avail. "I've said time again; Mexico will not pay for any wall," Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto tweeted, cancelling a summit in Washington. Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn emerged unconvinced that a wall would do anything along a border that was already fenced, triple-fenced in some places, buzzing with helicopters, planted with sensors and patrolled by thousands of federal agents and crossed — legally — by 1 million people a day.

The price tag came in at $21 billion and counting, for more rugged regions like the Arizona and Texas borders. The Wall went on life support.

Though prototypes were commissioned to equally great fanfare, there was no money for the Wall in 2017. In 2018, Congress funded the government but with explicit instructions that more than $1 billion to be spent on border security was to be spent on existing structures, equipment and systems — nothing new.

So, on March 23, 2018, Trump huffily signed the 2,232-page, $1.3 trillion spending bill and went golfing. Perhaps Mexicans will mark the date an official holiday.

But here the uproar of betrayal rang out. He had effectively signed the Wall's death certificate; at the very least, the next election will put more Democrats in Congress, not fewer.

"If you want the guy to screw you repeatedly, you have to be one of his voters," tweeted his onetime fan, Ann Coulter, author of In Trump We Trust. The conservative pit viper has continued to advise the president via Fox News that he can still build the wall with the military's money, as commander-in-chief, and he has dutifully tweeted the same.

It's just a pity that she was absent the day they taught law in law school. The Defense Department's own finance regulations, Volume 3, Chapter 6, prohibit it from simply taking billions of dollars that Congress, under the Constitution, spent on one thing and spending it on another without Congress approving all over again. And fat chance of that: building the wall would literally cost us every single new F-35 and F/A-18 fighter, two new submarines and an aircraft carrier.

In all seriousness, the Wall was a symbol of hatred and bigotry lashing out without purpose. The Wall was a waste. But it did symbolize the emptiness of Trump's many promises, stacked high into the sky, like tax cuts that people aren't seeing materialize in their pay checks and coal mining jobs that aren't ever coming back and so on.

Like a lot of things rising out of the hot desert air to a fevered imagination, The Wall was never real at all. It was just another mirage.

Richard Parker is a writer in Austin and the author of Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America. He is a frequent contributor to The Dallas Morning News. Twitter: @richardparkertx

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