“And the wall is being built. It’s going up rapidly. … We’re building very large sections of wall. … We’re building different sections simultaneously. And we think by the end of next year — which will be sometime right after the election, actually — but we think we’re going to have close to 500 miles of wall which will be complete. That’ll be — what we wanted to do is about 500 miles. That will take care of all of the areas that we wanted, including some of the marginal areas that we didn’t necessarily need.”
— President Trump, in remarks at the White House, Sept. 4
Builders are at work along the southern border — but not on the concrete wall Trump promised in the 2016 campaign. Instead, they’re building see-through fences and vehicle barriers, in many cases replacing older infrastructure that was already there.
Nevertheless, this is the false claim Trump most often repeats. As of Aug. 5, the president had said 190 times that a border wall was under construction, according to The Fact Checker’s database tracking all of Trump’s false or misleading statements. (The remarks above, from Wednesday, show the count is higher by now.)
Trump earned Three Pinocchios for his wall-under-construction claim in April 2018. A year and a half later, we’re taking a fresh look at the issue in light of recent developments.
View the complete September 6 article by Salvador Rizzo on The Washington Post website here.