THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

When Donald Trump spews about one of his pet ideas, he is like an uncontrolled gusher, covering everything with his filthy idea. One of his biggest spews has, after one year of Yuge promises, still not amounted to a hill of Trump promises.

Almost a year into Donald Trump’s presidency, the border wall he passionately promoted throughout his election campaign amounts to eight prototypes, no more than 30 feet long each, sitting in a desert outside San Diego.

No funding has been appropriated by Congress to advance the project beyond the testing phase. There’s no final design. And despite Trump’s rallying cry that Mexico would pay for the barrier, that country hasn’t contributed a peso.

The wall, an emotional centerpiece of Trump’s populist candidacy, is resurfacing as Washington turns from tax legislation to a fight over government spending for the rest of the fiscal year. A spending package Congress plans to debate in January will test whether his promise can ever be fulfilled.

Tensions over immigration are returning to center stage as Democrats seek to use the January spending measure to restore legal protections against deportation to hundreds of thousands of people brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Trump has said he would like an agreement to fund the wall in return, and he resumed pressing for the wall even as he celebrated Republicans’ tax overhaul.

“We’re calling on Congress to fund the border wall, which we’re getting very close to,” Trump said Dec. 20 during a Cabinet meeting at the White House. “We have some wonderful prototypes that have been put up. And I may be going there, very shortly, to look at them in their final form.”

Despite being a central component of Trump’s winning presidential campaign, the border wall has run into opposition from both Democrats and Republicans. As the White House seeks to recap its accomplishments--senior administration officials gathered reporters last Thursday to tout Trump’s first year--significant progress on a border wall is not one of them.

“I’m not surprised, that a year into his presidency, we say ‘Gee, why hasn’t that wall been built?”’ said Barbara Perry, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia. “Well that was one of those things that was so outrageous that it was never going to happen.”

The White House didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Trump has occasionally vented frustration with the pace of progress on the wall, but has nonetheless projected confidence that it will eventually be built.

“We’re going to get the wall,” Trump said Dec. 8 at the White House. “If we don’t get the wall, then I got a lot of very unhappy people, starting with me.”

Making the Tangerine Shitgibbon unhappy is a worthwhile project in comparison to the Great Wall of Trump.