House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) mocked President Donald Trump’s changing version of his border wall, calling his latest iteration a “beaded curtain” in an interview with USA Today.
Trump insisted throughout his campaign and during much of the last nearly two years as president that the wall would be concrete. Now he’s talking about a “slat fence” made of steel or a “steel slat barrier,” which he proclaimed will be “artistically designed” and “beautiful.”
It’s “a wall or a slat fence, or whatever you want to call it,” he said later in a video the night the partial government shutdown began after he refused to sign any temporary spending bill unless it included billions of dollars for his wall.
Pelosi scoffed in the interview, published Tuesday, “First of all ... he says, ‘We’re going to build a wall with cement, and Mexico’s going to pay for it.’ While he’s already backed off of the cement, now he’s down to, I think, a beaded curtain or something.”
As for Mexico paying for a wall, budget director and incoming acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney said in an interview on ABC Sunday that “you and I know it cannot work exactly like that.” He conceded that the Department of Homeland Security “can’t actually spend money from Mexico; we have to get it from the Treasury.”
Pelosi, likely to become speaker of the House after Democrats take control of the chamber in January, also ripped Trump in the interview as a “fear monger” stirring up unfounded worries of immigrant “terrorism” and disease. “He’s using scare tactics that are not evidence-based, and it’s wrong,” she told USA Today.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this story indicated Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was likely to become the House majority leader instead of House speaker.
