The folks around trump are beginning to discuss something that has been clear for months. The Wall is not forgotten. Here is how it may fit into Trump's End Game.

First, disguise it

The intention is to call it "securing our border." This is said to include rebuilding the military. So the wall, which we do not need, is being paired with giving $50 billion or so to a military that is already embarrassingly huge. We are not talking about creating a peaceable face to the world.

We are going to create a military that exceeds those of the next seven nations beneath it.

And we are going to give Trump his wall.

Only it's not going to happen

The money needed to accomplish the military-wall ploy has as much chance of becoming available as Trumpcare had of becoming law. The GOP is as divided as any entity in the fractured America that Trump is "making great again." It starts on the right with a schizoid allegiance to militarism combined with a hatred of governance. It moves to a middle which is amorphous but generally inclined to the right. On the left, you have the few people who think rationally.

Prelude to a shutdown

What destruction that is not done by the GOP will be accomplished by the Democrats.

The Trump agenda is already in the toaster, while Trump swings his mashie niblick at Bedminster and the GOP returns to the red state hinterlands. There it is expected that the hapless Republican legislators will get an earful about having accomplished nothing.

That means they will return with a sinking feeling that the drought will continue.

The lay of collapse land

The two essentials of a government shutdown, now merely anticipated between now and the end of the year, are flat out disagreement over where limited resources should go and that infernal wall. The wall is doomed to be an object of derision, the objective correlative of Trump's own grandiose simplifications of our problems.

But this simplification is welcome in the Trump-Bannon world.

Mexico has made it transcript-clear that it will not pay for the wall. Countless criticisms have noted that it can never be more than a symbolic nod to Trump's crazed fantasy. It is like the huge gold tooth in Frank Norris' novel of American greed "McTeague."

Robbery is a bad basis for a budget

In order to create the basis for his budget, Trump spent his first hundred days eviscerating the government so he could pay more and more to the military. Vital health services like research on disease were zapped to pave the way for more tanks and money for the already portly weapons business. We are heading for a royal mess, and the GOP and Trump are no better prepared for this tsunami than they were for the demise of Trumpcare.