As the shutdown drags on, the sole "concession" that President Donald Trump has been willing to offer Democrats so far is to make his border wall out of steel slats rather than concrete (even though Democrats never said that the choice of construction materials was why they opposed the wall).
But as it turns out, all Trump managed to do was make his wall even more useless.
According to NBC News, Department of Homeland Security tests of all eight prototype border walls currently constructed at the "Pogo Row" site in Otay Mesa, CA, revealed that all of them were vulnerable to breaching — but that in particular, the "steel bollard" design Trump is now touting as his choice can be sliced through with a saw:
DHS, for their part, insists that the actual finished version of the steel bollard fence, variants of which are already in use, will contain stronger materials that are tougher to saw through, and that even a barrier that can be breached is useful because it buys time for officers to respond.
But even if the steel slats were harder to saw through, this design has some pretty obvious flaws. The Washington Post has pointed out that even if the gaps between the slats are less than a foot wide, it might be possible to squeeze people or packages through it. And while Trump's previous idea for a concrete wall was frequently mocked as being easily defeatable with a ladder, you wouldn't even need a ladder to get over a steel bollard fence: you could just climb one of the bollards!
Trump's border wall proposal is one of the most fundamentally flawed ideas to ever have defined a presidential campaign. But somehow, he has managed to make it even more ridiculous.