The most memorable promise that Mr. Trump made on the campaign trail was to erect an impenetrable barrier along the entire southern border, which is almost 2,000 miles, and to have Mexico pay for it. … “Mostly it was rhetoric, and a lot less on the ground,” said Louis DeSipio, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine. “He used the wall to convince people that there were simple solutions to a problem that every president before him had recognized was complex and required careful consideration,” Mr. DeSipio said.

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