October 02, 2019 08:53 AM UTC

Alligator Moats, Electrified Walls, and Migrant Snipers

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• by: Colorado Pols

If you were still one of the holdouts who didn’t believe that President Trump is completely out of his goddamn mind, new reports about Trump’s ideas for tightening border security should be enough to convince you otherwise.

As the New York Times reports:

The Oval Office meeting this past March began, as so many had, with President Trump fuming about migrants. But this time he had a solution. As White House advisers listened astonished, he ordered them to shut down the entire 2,000-mile border with Mexico — by noon the next day.

The advisers feared the president’s edict would trap American tourists in Mexico, strand children at schools on both sides of the border and create an economic meltdown in two countries. Yet they also knew how much the president’s zeal to stop immigration had sent him lurching for solutions, one more extreme than the next.

Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate. He wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That’s not allowed either, they told him. [Pols emphasis]

Read that last paragraph again, and remember that these are serious proposals from the actual President of the United States of America.

In typical Trump fashion, the President expressed frustration to his advisors that more wasn’t being done to stop the flow of immigrants along the Mexico border. “You are making me look like an idiot!” he shouted during a March meeting in the Oval Office, completely oblivious to the absurdity of his own ideas. It’s worth noting that White House aides reportedly did look into cost estimates for an alligator moat.

Trump is not the first President to think of an alligator moat, though he is most certainly the first to have suggested it as a serious proposal. President Barack Obama once mentioned the idea of an alligator moat for border security — as a joke. As CBS News reported in May 2011:

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” Obama said. “But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I gotta say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time.”

“Maybe they’ll need a moat,” Obama said mockingly to laughter from the crowd. “Maybe they’ll want alligators in the moat.” [Pols emphasis]

As far back as 2007, The Onion was laughing at the idea of an alligator moat as a border security option.

We’ll take this opportunity to remind you that Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Yuma) is one of the headliners at a Trump 2020 fundraiser this weekend in New York City. One day Gardner will tell his grandkids about the years in which he pandered to a lunatic.