A daily roundup of the biggest stories in right-wing media.
While conservative media outlets remained generally positive about Donald Trump’s performance in the lead up to his 100th day in office, some began to worry about the status of his signature campaign promise, a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Thursday, Gateway Pundit published a post in which it spotlighted the concerns of National Border Patrol Council President Brandon Judd, who claimed his organization would be “very upset” if the wall wasn’t built. Gateway Pundit, typically one of Trump’s strongest allies, set one of Judd’s questions in bold: “Why continue to vote for people if they don’t keep the promises that they made on the campaign trail?”
Judd isn’t the only one worried that Trump could lose support over the wall. As Breitbart reported, Republican National Committee Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel suggested that voters would “hold [the GOP] accountable” if they didn’t make good on the promised wall. Breitbart’s commenters seemed to agree, as did Ann Coulter, who promised in the Daily Caller that there “will be a bloodbath” if the party doesn’t find a way to pay for Trump’s project. “Do not imagine that a Trump double-cross on the wall will not destroy the Republican Party,” Coulter continued. “Oh, we’ll get them back. No, you won’t. Trump wasn’t a distraction: He was the last chance to save the GOP.”
Coulter argued that the wall would be worth it, even it meant risking a government shutdown. “A failure to build the wall IS a government shutdown,” she wrote. Rush Limbaugh argued that a government shutdown is nothing to get worked up over anyway, especially if it means finding funding for the wall. “Two-thirds of the government cannot shut down. We’re only talking about the third of government that’s discretionary spending, and even at that, nobody loses their jobs, and nobody loses their Thanksgiving turkey,” he said.
But where was funding supposed to come from? Some conservative outlets admitted that it didn’t look likely that Mexico would be paying, despite Trump’s ongoing insistence that it would. Independent Journal Review wrote that Mexico’s foreign relations secretary had “thr[own] gasoline on the fire” by suggesting that the country might withdraw from cooperative security efforts with the United States—and might even consider imposing an entry fee on visitors.
On Wednesday, Ted Cruz floated another possible solution in an appearance on Fox & Friends, proposing, as LifeZette glossed it the next day, that the United States should “seize $14 billion in cash and assets from Mexican drug lord ‘El Chapo’ to pay for President Donald Trump’s border wall.” The only trouble with that idea? According to LifeZette, Cruz had lifted it from the publication’s editor in chief, Laura Ingraham. “But … Cruz made no mention of the origins of the notion,” LifeZette complained.
On social media, a post warning about the dangers of cyanide spraying pipes spread widely:
