Americans do not want The Wall. We know this because even with a Republican-controlled Congress in 2018, Donald Trump was unable to get funding for The Wall. Now that the Democrats control the House, Trump is on a tirade that the Democrats are against border security. He is trying to equate border security with The Wall to make it more palatable. Trump says that the American people want The Wall. Trump says that the furloughed federal workers want The Wall. Donald Trump says many things.

As I have written several times before, America is governed by a representative government, where elected officials make laws based on the will of the electorate. Congress has said no to The Wall, even when it was Republican controlled.

But Donald Trump keeps trying to spin The Wall funding debacle.

The obvious question is whether Americans want The Wall.

There is a large group of Americans that do want The Wall. This, we cannot deny. But do they represent the will of the American people?

Through Congress we already know that the majority do not want The Wall.

But that is not enough for Donald Trump and his supporters. So, let’s look at more proof that Americans do not want The Wall.

Polls are good barometer for getting an idea about how the American people feel. They are not perfect, but they offer an insight we can’t get anywhere else. On Sunday two polls were released. One from CNN and another from ABC News and the Washington Post.

The CNN poll shows us an interesting metric. The SRSS poll conducted for CNN shows us that of the Americans that were polled on January 2017, almost 60% were against The Wall. In January 2018, over 60% of the Americans polled, were against The Wall. For January 2019, the poll shows that 56% of the Americans polled are against The Wall. Those who favor The Wall hovers consistently at around 40%. For January, those in favor of The Wall was at 39%.

Clearly, most of the Americans are against The Wall, at least those polled by CNN.

The ABC News/Washington Post poll gives us more insight. According to this poll, 54% of those polled are oppose to The Wall.

Understanding that the Congress represents the will of the people and adding to that the metrics from the two latest polls clearly tells us that:

Americans oppose The Wall.

But how about the furloughed workers? Do they want The Wall?

Trump says they are behind him. Trump even parades many of them before the cameras. But the question many of you should be asking yourselves is whether you would lie in front of the cameras to keep your job, or because of loyalty to your employer. Parading furloughed workers, especially the ones that work for departments that stand to benefit greatly from federal funding because of the rhetoric of The Wall, does not prove that most furloughed workers want The Wall.

We can’t know without polling each furloughed federal workers individually with the guarantee that their jobs won’t be affected by their honest answer. But we can derive some evidence of how the furloughed workers feel by their public actions.

The Transportation Security Administration gives us a good indicator. TSA is dealing with long lines at airports due to TSA workers not reporting to work. Already two airports in Florida have either shutdown TSA queues or threatened employees for calling sick. Long lines at other airports signal a disruption of services due to worker shortage.

The FBI has said there could be a dangerous situation with support employees not going to work due to the government shut down. The IRS is calling in more workers, without pay, to deal with the tax season. And, some federal workers are suing the federal government for being forced to work without pay.

Clearly not all federal furloughed workers want The Wall. Most likely, many don’t even care, they just want a pay check for their work.

In other words, many of the federal workers not being paid are not “supporting” Donald Trump regardless of what he says.

Donald Trump continues to hold America hostage for something that the American people clearly do not want.