It's hard to say what's worse about Trump's wall: The incompetence or the corruption

[Zorro]

The construction of the border wall continues past a gap, blocked with vehicle barriers, where the soil seemed to be washed out from beneath where the bollard panels would go outside Douglas, Ariz., on January 5. (Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post)

PRESIDENT TRUMP, no stickler for bureaucratic procedure, had no qualms about pushing the Army Corps of Engineers to award a major construction contract for his border wall to a North Dakota firm whose chief executive repeatedly went on Fox News to tout the project and his company’s ability to build it. That presidential meddling, now the subject of a Pentagon investigation, worked out nicely for Fisher Sand & Gravel, which won $1.7 billion in border wall contracts — despite having virtually no track record in construction.

Now, the president is bashing a segment of the wall in Texas that Fisher built as a showcase private project that, according to engineers who have examined photographs of the erosion at its base, is at risk of falling into the Rio Grande. “It was only done to make me look bad, and [perhaps] it now doesn’t even work,” Mr. Trump tweeted Sunday.

It may not work, but it was hardly done to embarrass the president. Both Tommy Fisher, the firm’s eponymous chief executive who lobbied for wall contracts, and a conservative nonprofit group that launched the project on private land with money raised online, are vociferous supporters of the president. The board of the nonprofit, called We Build the Wall, includes Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former chief strategist.

Mr. Trump’s wall is a troubled vanity project. Just 200 miles have been built — not the 500 he promised would be complete by the end of this year — and most of that is replacement for existing segments that were shorter or run-down. Smugglers have sawn through and climbed over parts of the new barrier.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/its-hard-to-say-whats-worse-about-trumps-wall-the-incompetence-or-the-corruption/2020/07/15/5c996144-c553-11ea-a99f-3bbdffb1af38_story.html