Glenn Thrush

Biden made his comments during a campaign swing through Nevada after days of internal debate among his advisers over how best to refute unsubstantiated claims by the president and his personal lawyer that Biden improperly assisted his son’s business ventures in Ukraine and China.

The counterattack, people close to Biden said, was intended to demonstrate what he has been promising supporters for the past week: that he would not let Trump “hijack” his campaign by allowing the president’s narrative to take root. It was also intended to prove, in a walk-and-chew-gum kind of way, that he could multitask even when facing withering political fire — unveiling a serious policy proposal on guns early Wednesday in Las Vegas, then pivoting to a sharp political attack by nightfall in the north.

In the speech, the former vice president said the attacks on his family were intended to divert attention from the widening impeachment inquiry into Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens — and he cited them as proof that the White House feared him more than any other Democratic presidential contender.

“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me: I’m not going anywhere,” Biden told a crowd of about 500 at the Truckee Meadows Community College here.

“You’re not going to destroy me,” he said to cheers from supporters, a handful wearing “Impeach 45” jerseys. “And you’re not going to destroy my family. I don’t care how much money you spend or how dirty the attacks get.”

The American people, Biden said, “know me and they know him. The idea of Donald Trump attacking anyone’s credibility is a joke.”

Earlier in the day, speaking at a gun safety forum in Las Vegas, Biden excoriated the president and jokingly pretended to mispronounce the last name of his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who has communicated with Ukrainian officials on Trump’s behalf.

He said there was “zero, zero, zero” evidence that his family had done anything wrong.

Biden’s increasingly bitter fight with Trump comes at a potential tipping point in the 2020 Democratic presidential race. Until recently, Biden had been leading in most national polls since he entered the field last spring.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, fueled by a highly disciplined campaign, has surged in many early-voting states.

A Monmouth University national poll released Wednesday showed Biden locked in a statistical dead heat with Warren, who garnered 28% support from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to his 25%, a difference within the survey’s margin of error.

At Wednesday night’s rally, Biden took a swipe at some of his Democratic opponents who have accused him of focusing too much on Trump and not enough on issues facing voters.

“A lot of my opponents say we have to do more than just beat Donald Trump,” he said. “I agree. We have to do more than beat Donald Trump. We have to beat him like a drum.”

Biden’s team has been alarmed by reports that Trump’s supporters plan to launch an aggressive advertising campaign to portray the former vice president as the person who had acted improperly — despite the lack of any evidence to support that claim.

And Biden’s top advisers have been equally incensed by what they view as the news media’s willingness to air unsupported allegations by Trump and Giuliani.

The president and his lawyer have alleged that Biden, as vice president, pressured the Ukrainians to force out a top prosecutor to derail an inquiry into a Ukrainian company that paid his son, Hunter Biden. But Biden said Wednesday that he had been enforcing the demands of the Obama administration and other Western nations by seeking to replace the prosecutor with an official more committed to fighting corruption.

On Sunday, Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield, two senior Biden strategists, wrote to several major television networks asking them to stop booking Giuliani on their news programs, accusing him of spreading “debunked conspiracy theories.”

Biden amplified that argument Wednesday, urging reporters to regard Trump’s statements, and his tweets, as not simply fodder for controversy but as a dangerous “abuse of power” that included enlisting foreign leaders as allies in his reelection effort.

Trump, he said, is “afraid of just how badly I would beat him next November.”

The president, in his own remarks Wednesday, did not agree.

“I’d rather run against Biden than almost any of those candidates,” Trump told reporters at the White House.

This article originally appeared in

Joe Biden Warns Trump: 'You're Not Going to Destroy Me'

RENO, Nev. — Former Vice President Joe Biden on Wednesday night delivered his most forceful response yet to President Donald Trump’s attacks on him and his son, accusing the Trump team of waging a campaign of “lies, smears, distortions and name calling” geared at knocking him out of the presidential race.

Biden made his comments during a campaign swing through Nevada after days of internal debate among his advisers over how best to refute unsubstantiated claims by the president that Biden improperly assisted his son Hunter’s business ventures in Ukraine and China.

He said the attacks on his family were an attempt by the president to divert attention from the widening impeachment inquiry into Trump’s attempts to pressure Ukraine to investigate him — and cited them as proof that the White House feared him more than any other Democratic presidential contender.

“Let me make something clear to Trump and his hatchet men and the special interests funding his attacks against me: I’m not going anywhere,” Biden said at the Truckee Meadows Community College here, according to excerpts released before the speech.

“You’re not going to destroy me,” he said. “And you’re not going to destroy my family. I don’t care how much money you spend or how dirty the attacks get.”

Earlier in the day, speaking at a gun safety forum in Las Vegas, Biden excoriated the president and jokingly pretended to mispronounce the last name of his personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who has communicated with Ukrainian officials on Trump’s behalf.

Biden’s increasingly bitter fight with Trump comes at a potential tipping point in the 2020 Democratic presidential race. Until recently, Biden had led in most national polls since he entered the field last spring.

But Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, fueled by a highly disciplined campaign, has surged in many early-voting states, and even Biden’s aides concede that he remains prone to missteps and gaffes. A Monmouth University Poll released Wednesday showed Biden locked in a statistical dead heat with Warren, who garnered 28% support from Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters to his 25%, a difference within the survey’s margin of error.

Biden and his advisers have been alarmed by reports that Trump’s supporters plan to launch an aggressive advertising campaign to portray the former vice president, and not the president, as the person who acted improperly — despite the lack of any evidence to support that claim.

But Biden’s top advisers have been equally incensed by what they view as the news media’s willingness to air unsupported allegations by Trump and Giuliani.

Trump and Giuliani have alleged that Biden, as vice president, pressured the Ukrainians to force out a top prosecutor in order to derail an inquiry into a Ukrainian company that paid his son Hunter Biden. Biden was enforcing the demands of the Obama administration and other Western nations, who saw the prosecutor as corrupt.

On Sunday, Anita Dunn and Kate Bedingfield, two senior Biden strategists, wrote to several major TV networks asking them to stop booking Giuliani, accusing him of spreading “debunked conspiracy theories.”

Biden amplified that argument on Wednesday, urging reporters to regard Trump’s statements, and his tweets, not as fodder for controversy but as a dangerous “abuse of power” that included enlisting foreign leaders as allies in his reelection effort.

“It’s important to step back from the heated 24-hour news cycle and focus carefully on the larger story,” he said, according to his remarks as prepared for delivery. “It’s not about Donald Trump’s antics. It’s about what has brought Donald Trump, and the nation, to this sobering moment in our history — and to the choice facing us in 2020. What has brought us here is simply this: the abuse of power.”

Trump, he added, is “afraid of just how badly I would beat him next November.”

Biden Will Denounce Trump's 'Lies, Smears, Distortions' in Speech

RENO, Nev. — Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered his most forceful response yet to President Donald Trump’s attacks on him and his son, denouncing what he called a campaign of “lies, smears, distortions and name calling” in a speech here Wednesday night.

WASHINGTON — Barack Obama was riding his call for generational change to the Democratic presidential nomination in the spring of 2008 when he began musing about potential running mates with aides traveling with him on the trail.

“I want somebody with gray in his hair,” Obama, then 46, told one of them. He was thinking about an “older guy,” he told another.

That older guy, people around the candidate would soon learn, was Joe Biden, 65, a has-been to pundits but to Obama a sweet-spot pick — a policy heavyweight with limited political horizons, assuming that would ensure loyalty and minimal drama. Obama was already phoning Biden two or three times a week to solicit advice, and to decide whether the Delaware senator’s many positive attributes outweighed his singular liability, a notoriously self-tangling tongue.

Over the next several months, Obama’s top advisers would present 30 alternatives, all of whom he respectfully considered. But his preference was clear from the start. When it came time to decide in August, Obama chose Biden over two younger finalists — Tim Kaine, the governor of Virginia, and Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, peers in the mold of Bill Clinton’s choice of Al Gore in 1992.

“You are the pick of my heart, but Joe is the pick of my head,” Obama told Kaine after he made his choice, according to people with knowledge of the exchange.

Eleven years later, Obama’s cautions and calculations have come to roost.

Obama, standard-bearer of change but conscious of the racial dynamics of his candidacy, was wary of asking voters to digest too much at once. In Biden, he found a running mate who would conjure the comforting past and provide experience he did not possess, but would not maneuver for the presidency from the No. 2 slot.

While Biden exceeded the first two expectations, he never abandoned his aspirations for the top job. He has leveraged his steady vice presidency into a fragile front-runner status in the 2020 primary, at the even more advanced, and politically vulnerable, age of 76.

What’s more, the choice of Biden as a hedge against change has left the demographically and ideologically evolving Democrats profoundly divided as they desperately seek to unseat President Donald Trump. Even as Biden casts himself as the man to complete and cement the Obama legacy, that legacy has moved to the center of the Democrats’ fractious debate.

The Obama-Biden origin story has been often told, and often sentimentalized. But a re-examination at this crystallizing moment of the primary campaign, based on more than two dozen interviews with Obama and Biden aides and others with knowledge of the relationship, reveals a more complicated dynamic between the two men, and one that is still evolving.

Biden and his advisers initially thought he might be a better fit as Obama’s secretary of state, and he bridled at the Obama campaign’s attempt to control his every utterance and personnel move. He exploded when campaign researchers began asking questions about the private life of his family, especially his younger son, Hunter.

Obama, for his part, took a long time to warm to Biden, and kept him at arms’ length in the early days. Up until earlier this year, he suggested Biden would be better off sticking with his vague promise, made during the audition for the vice presidency, that his short-lived 2008 presidential campaign would be his last.

That has changed: While initially skeptical of Biden’s decision to run, Obama, driven by affection and loyalty, has been more active in advising his campaign than previously known — going so far as to request a briefing from the campaign before his friend officially joined the fray, according to people close to both men.

“It’s an incredible turn of events, when you think about it,” said Bayh, who retired from the Senate in 2011. “The question then was, ‘Do you happen to fit the moment?’ The question now is, ‘After all these years, can you turn yourself into an independent source of power, as opposed to being just a loyal and faithful wingman?’ Only time will tell.”

A Difficult Decision

Obama’s two top strategists, David Plouffe and David Axelrod, had Biden at the top of their list. The choice was not just about politics and optics. Obama, confident to the point of cockiness about his political chops, was privately expressing anxiety about his ability to govern — conceding that Hillary Clinton, his chief rival for the nomination, had made valid points about his inexperience.

What most impressed Obama’s advisers, however, was Biden’s ease with his family; he was comfortable expressing affection to his wife and grown children in a way that most politicians, including Obama, were not.

The intensity of those bonds would become apparent after Obama picked Biden, and campaign researchers uncovered potential public relations problems stemming from Biden’s son Hunter, including complications from his lobbying work and indications of marital, legal and substance-abuse problems. (Those issues were examined in detail by The New Yorker earlier this year.)

When an Obama campaign official flagged the issue, Biden grew angry and warned, “Keep my family out of this.” The issue was dropped, according to a person involved in the vetting process.

Biden would be the final person he spoke to before making a big decision, and the two men would have weekly lunches. Biden also made a loyalty pledge that would become the basis of their deeper personal bond. “You make a decision, and I will follow it to my death,” Biden said, according to Ted Kaufman, one of Biden’s oldest friends and advisers.

At some point, Biden also told Obama aides that “Barack would never have to worry” about him positioning himself for another presidential run. He was too old, he told them, and he viewed his new job as a capstone, not a catapult. But while both sides assumed that vow covered the duration of Obama’s presidency, what might happen after that was never explicitly stated.

Biden was the only one of the finalists to make such a promise. “That was helpful,” Plouffe said.

A Protective Partner

The next eight years are the stuff of buddy-movie lore — “a shotgun marriage that gradually turned into a love story,” in Axelrod’s telling.

Still, Biden’s simmering ambition was a source of unease for both men. Plouffe shut down an early move made by Biden as vice president to assemble a presidential team-in-waiting, blocking Biden’s attempts to court the party’s West Coast fundraising elite and rejecting an attempt to hire Kevin Sheekey, a veteran Democratic operative.

In 2016, Obama quietly pressured Biden to sit out the race, partly because he believed Clinton had a better chance of building on his agenda, and partly because he thought Biden was in no shape emotionally following the illness and death of his son Beau in May 2015.

By now, the line between heart and head, between the personal and political, so clear a decade ago, has blurred completely.

The two men spoke at least a half-dozen times before Biden decided to run, and Obama took pains to cast his doubts about the campaign in personal terms.

“You don’t have to do this, Joe, you really don’t,” Obama told Biden earlier this year, according to a person familiar with the exchange.

In his interactions with Biden — the pair had a quiet lunch in Washington last month — Obama has hammered away at the need for his campaign to expand his aging inner circle.

In March, Obama took the unusual step of summoning Biden’s top campaign advisers, including the former White House communications director Anita Dunn and Biden’s longtime spokeswoman, Kate Bedingfield, to his Washington office for a briefing on the campaign’s digital and communications strategy with members of his own staff, including his senior adviser, Eric Schultz.

When they were done, Obama offered a pointed reminder, according to two people with knowledge of his comments:

Win or lose, they needed to make sure Biden did not “embarrass himself” or “damage his legacy” during the campaign.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/16/us/politics/biden-obama-history.html" id="c46f8101-64b6-3547-a297-5233239a7ed3">The New York Times</a>.

Obama and Biden's Relationship Looks Rosy. It Wasn't Always That Simple.

(The Long Run)

Pelosi, D-Calif., was not responding to new information about the safety of Omar, according to a senior Democratic aide. She called for the review based on dozens of threats made on Omar’s life before Trump posted the video Friday, the aide said.

“Following the president’s tweet, I spoke with the sergeant-at-arms to ensure that Capitol Police are conducting a security assessment to safeguard Congresswoman Omar, her family and her staff,” Pelosi said in a statement. “They will continue to monitor and address the threats she faces.”

After Pelosi released her statement, a spokesman for Omar, Jeremy Slevin, said, “Our office has seen an increase in direct threats on Rep. Omar’s life — many directly referencing the president’s video.” He said Omar’s office has collected a series of menacing tweets over the past few days, some accusing her of treason.

The footage promoted by Trump intercut images of the World Trade Center aflame with comments from Omar, one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress, about the treatment of Muslims after Sept. 11. Conservatives have seized on those remarks as dismissive of the attacks.

“The president’s words weigh a ton, and his hateful and inflammatory rhetoric creates real danger,” Pelosi said. “President Trump must take down his disrespectful and dangerous video.”

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House press secretary, said Trump was not inciting violence against Omar, or Muslims in general, and would not be ashamed for “speaking out against” violence. She added that Democrats should be “taking the same hard line that the president is” against Omar.

Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday” that referring to the Sept. 11 attacks “in such a dismissive way is frankly disgusting and abhorrent.”

Omar, appearing at an event in Los Angeles in March sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, an advocacy organization, suggested that government officials infringed upon the free-speech rights of some Muslim Americans after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“CAIR was founded after 9/11 because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties,” she said, making an incorrect reference to the organization’s founding, which actually took place in 1994.

Omar’s critics have seized on the “some people did something” remark. But others have said the words were taken out of context. The speech focused on attacks Muslims in America faced after Sept. 11. A spokesman for Omar has said the entire speech was addressing civil rights and the “danger of Islamophobia in the United States and around the world — in particular the danger of associating all members of a religion with the acts of a few despicable terrorists.”

Pelosi, who is traveling in Europe during the congressional recess, has tried to contact Omar, but her travel schedule has made it difficult for the two to connect, a Democratic aide said. The speaker criticized Trump in a series of early-morning tweets Sunday from Germany, where she was visiting with U.S. service members.

“It is wrong for the President, as Commander-in-Chief, to fan the flames to make anyone less safe,” she wrote.

But the remarks have caught fire in conservative circles. The New York Post, owned by Trump ally Rupert Murdoch, juxtaposed Omar’s comments with a picture of the twin towers on its cover last week.

On Friday, Trump followed suit. “WE WILL NEVER FORGET,” the president tweeted to his nearly 60 million followers, while posting the video that repeatedly played Omar’s reference to “some people,” then cut to the planes slamming into the Manhattan skyline.

Omar has been the subject of numerous threats. Earlier this month, federal prosecutors charged a New York state man with phoning in a death threat to her.

The attacks on the congresswoman have provided Democrats with a rare opportunity to unify around Omar, whose previous comments about Israel have been interpreted as anti-Semitic by some Jewish Democrats in Congress. After a fierce internal debate, Democrats passed a catchall anti-bigotry resolution in March that was intended, in part, to put the controversy over Omar’s remarks to rest.

Pelosi joins a growing list of Democrats, including many of the declared 2020 candidates, who have denounced Trump’s tweet.

On Saturday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., accused the president of “inciting violence against a sitting Congresswoman — and an entire group of Americans based on their religion” in a tweet.

Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., said Trump’s actions were another reminder of how important it was to unseat him in 2020.

“For two years, this President has used the most powerful platform in the world to sow hate &amp; division,” she tweeted. "I’ll be blunt — we must defeat him.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/14/us/politics/pelosi-ilhan-omar-trump-tweet.html" id="9ca2b748-da1c-357f-aeba-b79bffd3f52f">The New York Times</a>.

WASHINGTON — House Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked House officials on Sunday to review security measures intended to protect Rep. Ilhan Omar after President Donald Trump tweeted a video attacking the Minnesota Democrat using images of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Pelosi Requests Security Review to Protect Ilhan Omar After Trump Tweet

The semantics, however, are anything but trivial. If the White House and House Democrats are to reach a deal to avert another government shutdown by the Feb. 15 deadline, they must first reach a rough détente over what they are talking about — in particular, the definition of Trump’s “wall,” and of “border security,” the Democrats’ catchall description of their own approach.

“There’s no magic glossary telling you the difference between a fence and wall or a barrier, they are kind of interchangeable,” said Jeh Johnson, who served as President Barack Obama’s homeland security secretary from 2013 to 2017.

“There is a distinction between governing and political rhetoric, and people should not get trapped in the binary,” Johnson said. “The moment when we reach a compromise on the vocabulary is the moment we reach a compromise on the policy.”

Here is a glossary that could determine the fate of the debate.

The Wall

It started its rhetorical life at 35 to 40 feet high in early 2016, peaked at 50 feet midcampaign, then fell back to 32 feet in January 2018.

In the beginning, there was a tweet.

At 4:34 p.m. Aug. 5, 2014, Trump sent a message: “SECURE THE BORDER! BUILD THE WALL!”

Trump’s definition of “wall” has been a moving target since.

In the early days of the 2016 campaign, Trump said the wall should be built of “precast concrete” with “no windows, no nothing.” He now says that he always meant that steel and “see-through” materials could work, too, and has, from time to time, mused about festooning the wall with solar panels. In December, he tweeted an image showing a puzzling rendering of a picketed “Steel Slat Barrier.”

Soon after taking office, the president commissioned eight prototypes of wall designs, four made of concrete and the remainder fabricated from steel and other materials. They ranged in height from 18 to 30 feet.

The models were tested last year, and the results were inconclusive, according to leaked documents showing that all of them could be breached with a determined effort and the right tools. But Trump administration officials say that the testing provided them with valuable information, and lessons learned were incorporated into an already built section of slatted 30-foot-high “bollard” fence near Calexico, California.

As Trump’s image of the wall changed, so did its price tag. He now wants $5.7 billion for the wall — but that number has bounced between $4 billion and $20 billion over the past three years. During the shutdown fight, he even suggested that he would accept an unspecified “down payment.”

‘I Would Ask for Wall.’

Kirstjen Nielsen said this in December before the House Judiciary Committee.

Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, was roundly mocked for dropping the article “the” before “wall” — with critics likening it to the “I love lamp” scene from “Anchorman.”

In reality, Nielsen was trying to keep her request as vague as possible to facilitate a compromise, while staying nominally true to Trump’s campaign promise.

“She was lampooned,” Johnson said. “But she was really just trying to introduce the concept that a wall could be almost any kind of a barrier.”

The fact that Nielsen felt compelled to use the “W” word indicated her concern about alienating members of Trump’s base, who roar “build the wall” at his rallies. To that end, members of the president’s team have been quietly removing the word “replacement” from public statements about upgrades to existing border barriers.

They instead insert the word “new,” according to an official familiar with the practice.

Border Security

Democrats have embraced the phrase border security, meant to describe a comprehensive approach that includes improvements in technology, new surveillance programs and increases in Border Patrol staffing.

As part of the failed 2014 “Gang of Eight” effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, a coalition of Senate Democrats supported a $46 billion bill to expand the Border Patrol, with improvements to existing fencing. The bill was shot down by House Republicans because it included a process that would have allowed many immigrants who entered the country illegally to remain in the country.

But the bill now stands as evidence to Trump and congressional Republicans of how Democrats in previous years voted to increase funding for barriers under the broad rubric of border security, when packaged with a path to citizenship.

But Trump’s political weaponization of the wall is now making such a compromise increasingly untenable for Democrats. “We’re not doing a wall,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters this month. “Does anyone have any doubt that we’re not doing a wall?”

The 2020 presidential campaign is making compromise even more difficult. Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., who announced this week that she is running for president, declared the wall “a medieval vanity project,” then vowed to make opposition to it a centerpiece of her campaign.

“The wall concept is an anathema to most Democrats,” said Geoff Garin, a veteran Democratic pollster who works for Priorities USA, a political action committee. “They are more than willing to have a granular conversation about what is common sense and effective border security, but it’s not going to be a conversation about a wall in any sense that Trump has used the word.”

Fencing

A bipartisan deal in 2006 — supported by Hillary Clinton and Obama — included funding for new and reinforced “fencing” along 700 miles of the southern border.

The word “fence” is, for the moment at least, less politically charged than “wall.”

In 2006, a coalition of Republicans and 90 Democrats in the House and the Senate — including Obama and Clinton, then senators — passed President George W. Bush’s plan to add more than 700 new miles of double-layered “reinforced” fencing.

“I am comfortable with barriers that involve vehicles, fences,” Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., told CNN this week.

But what exactly is meant by “fence”? The southern border is already a crazy-quilt of different border barriers of different sizes, different materials, installed in different eras — known, by and large, as fencing.

And they have different uses. Urban chain-link is meant to deter migrants on foot; an array of metal and concrete “vehicle barriers” have been strung in remote areas; and stretches of concertina wire are used to fill in gaps where there are no permanent structures and on top of structures where there are some. There are also dozens of variants — pickets, corrugated panels, berms, X-shaped steel barriers, even planked walls placed along Gulf Coast beaches.

In recent budget bills, Democrats have insisted on a provision limiting the expansion of barriers to “existing” technologies, a move intended to frame any new construction as an old “fence” rather than a new “wall,” according to a senior Democratic congressional aide.

Back in 2006, Pelosi and other congressional liberals voted against the reinforced fencing bill. It is not clear they would support a similar measure even if it were part of a more extensive deal that included a reprieve for the young immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA.

Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, was one of those who supported the 2006 bill, and late last year offered Trump a $25 billion deal that included protections for DACA recipients — and left open the possibility of more fencing. Pelosi did not agree to the proposal.

Pedestrian Fencing

The Department of Homeland Security has prioritized a plan to build about 100 miles of new fencing to keep out “pedestrians.”

Trump’s $5.7 billion request would pay for the installation of barriers on another 215 miles of border — in addition to an estimated 654 miles of fencing, much of it in the form of vehicle barriers, in place along the 1,900-mile border.

That number would include installation of about 100 miles of barriers to keep out migrants, many from Central America, seeking to enter the country on foot in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. Before the shutdown, Republican senators, led by John Cornyn of Texas, proposed passing $1.6 billion in funding for 65 miles of that project.

The idea went nowhere at the time. But a handful of congressional Democrats, including Sen. Jon Tester of Montana, did not rule out supporting the plan in the future.

‘Smart’ Wall

Nobody is quite sure what that means.

“The walls we are building are not medieval walls,” Trump said on Jan. 25 during his rambling Rose Garden announcement of the three-week funding deal that ended the 35-day government shutdown.

“These barriers are made of steel, have see-through visibility, which is very important, and are equipped with sensors, monitors and cutting-edge technology, including state-of-the-art drones,” he told reporters.

It seems like an unlikely gateway to compromise, but some Democrats believe the president was signaling his willingness to accept funding for new technologies, beyond steel and concrete.

Two days earlier, Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, the third-ranking Democrat in the House, told reporters that he would be open to fulfilling Trump’s $5.7 billion request if it were spent on a smart wall, targeted at improving border surveillance, the expanded use of drones and X-ray technology to screen for weapons and drugs, as well as on the hiring of more Border Patrol agents.

Trump, aides said, is open to spending some of the money on similar improvements. His idea of a smart wall was inspired by the one built by Israel on its border with Gaza, which uses high-tech surveillance equipment, including closed-circuit cameras.

Barrier

“You can call it a ‘barrier,’ you can call it whatever you want,” Trump said during a news conference on Jan. 11, adding, “They can name it whatever. They can name it ‘peaches.’ I don’t care what they name it. But we need money for that barrier.”

Trump’s language has softened as the funding fight has intensified, and “barrier” now enjoys pride of place next to “wall.”

“If the committee of Republicans and Democrats now meeting on Border Security is not discussing or contemplating a Wall or Physical Barrier, they are Wasting their time!” he tweeted on Wednesday.

A day later, he was back to wall-only: “Lets just call them WALLS from now on and stop playing political games! A WALL is a WALL!” he tweeted on Thursday.

Whether Trump was providing semantic cover for a compromise deal may depend on whether he is disciplined enough to tone down his messaging.

His allies seem eager for him to do so.

“It doesn’t have to be a wall,” Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif. and the minority leader, told reporters on Tuesday. “Physical barriers would be fine.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/politics/border-wall-types.html" id="7815e3bc-5837-3680-a485-70bd4297a177">The New York Times</a>.

He Says 'Wall,' They Say 'Border Security': A Glossary of the Border Debate

Kellyanne Conway, White House adviser, recently dismissed as a “silly semantic argument” questions about President Donald Trump’s use of the word “wall” — is it concrete, steel, see-through, a “smart wall,” slatted, piked, solar-powered, a chain-link fence or just a metaphor?

‘I Would Ask for Wall. We Need Wall.’

Nielsen, the homeland security secretary, was roundly mocked for dropping the “the” before “wall” — with critics likening it to the “I love lamp” scene from the movie “Anchorman.”

As part of the failed 2014 “Gang of Eight” effort to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, a coalition of Senate Democrats supported a $46 billion bill to expand the Border Patrol, with improvements to existing fencing. The bill was shot down by House Republicans because it included a process that would have allowed many illegal immigrants to remain in the country.

Back in 2006, Pelosi and other congressional liberals voted against the reinforced fencing bill. It is not clear they would support a similar measure even if it were part of a more extensive deal that included a reprieve for the young undocumented immigrants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA.

Trump’s $5.7 billion request would pay for the installation of barriers on another 215 miles of border — in addition to an estimated 654 miles of fencing, much of it in the form of vehicle barriers, currently in place along the 1,900-mile border.

A few days later, the dream was deferred. The Department of Housing and Urban Development — one of the federal agencies hit hardest by the shutdown — would not be able to pay her new landlord until the government reopened.

“It is my dream home. It’s like my last stop; it’s like my last chance — you know?” said Wormley-Mitsis, 39, who lives in Fall River, Massachusetts, and is staying with relatives until the check clears. “We drive by that house all the time. It’s torture. Waiting, waiting, waiting.”

One month after the government shutdown began, its effects have begun to hurt some of the most vulnerable Americans: not just homeless people, but also those who are one crisis away from the streets. And nonprofit groups dedicated to helping low-income renters are already scrambling to survive without the lifeblood payments from HUD that began being cut off Jan. 1.

That has left a small but growing number of tenants, like Wormley-Mitsis, in limbo. Landlords, especially smaller management companies operating on narrow margins, have begun pressuring poor, disabled and elderly tenants who cannot afford to make up the difference.

On Friday afternoon, a TriState Management employee in Newton, Arkansas, taped notices on the doors of 43 federally subsidized tenants, demanding that they cover the gap between what they typically pay and the full rent.

“As of Feb. 1, 2019, all tenants will be responsible for full basic rent,” the letter said. “We will extend the due date for the rent to the 20th of the month. This will remain in effect until the government opens up.”

Amanda Neeley’s heart sank. The three-bedroom home she shares with her daughter and granddaughter goes for a monthly rate of $505, of which she is required to pay $110. The rest — which her landlord now wants her to pay — is supposed to be picked up by the federal government under a program intended to help out the rural poor.

“This is putting a hurt on all of us. Everything was going along normal until they decided to shut down the government,” said Neeley, 48, who gets by on a small disability check. “I can’t pay that much; it is beyond my means. It is not fair.”

A TriState Management employee hung up the phone when asked about the policy Friday. But lawyers for the poor say that renters can fight evictions in court and many organizations, including the Fair Housing Action Center of Maryland, have begun distributing flyers informing tenants of their rights under local law.

A week earlier, a property manager at another subsidized low-income housing complex in rural Arkansas, run by the Agriculture Department, sent a similar notice to tenants. “Until the government opens again, you are responsible for ALL of your rental amount,” the letter said.

The letter was rescinded when federal officials vowed to cover the payments.

Most other social safety net programs are facing a similar, if less imminent, emergency. The Department of Agriculture has announced that funding for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which provides food stamps and other aid to almost 40 million poor and working-class Americans, will run out by March 1, and other nutrition programs are facing the same fate.

The Department of Health and Human Services was largely exempt from the showdown and Medicaid and Medicare are not affected by the funding lapse. But Congress failed to reauthorize one of its main programs, the $16.5 billion Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, which provides states with block grants for a range of services, cash welfare and child care. States are likely to pick up the tab for most programs, but a protracted shutdown lasting into the spring could result in cutbacks, according to analysts.

While the housing crisis is just starting to hit individual tenants, it has already wreaked havoc on organizations responsible for housing homeless people and providing support services to veterans, people with disabilities and victims of domestic abuse.

The funding lapse is being felt most acutely by providers who owe their survival to the month-to-month cash flow provided by the annual $2.8 billion federal Homeless Assistance Grant program.

Susie Sinclair-Smith has helped build a network to help homeless people in Maryland’s high-rent Washington suburbs, an impressive but precarious Jenga tower of programs dependent on $3 million in annual federal funding.

“The crisis has arrived,” said Sinclair-Smith, executive director of the Montgomery County Coalition for the Homeless. The last payment the group received from HUD was a $250,000 reimbursement for its December expenses, which arrived at the start of the year.

The coalition is now preparing to tap its modest reserve fund of just over $200,000 that was intended to cover unintended emergencies, like floods or the loss of benefits by individual clients. It will be used to bridge the loss of federal cash to cover rent, the salaries of case managers who provide support to disabled and elderly clients, maintenance costs, and other expenses for the 250 households of formerly homeless people.

“We can get by for a while, but what happens if one of our buildings gets hit by a flood?” Sinclair-Smith said.

In Boston, the Pine Street Inn, the region’s largest provider of homeless housing, is exploring its financial options to counter the loss of a major federal contract Feb. 1. It bankrolls one of the provider’s most important units, a seven-member outreach team that is responsible for finding affordable housing for homeless people, said Lyndia Downie, the group’s president.

In Kokomo, Indiana, shelters that serve homeless veterans and victims of domestic violence are struggling to remain open without the monthly subsidies. Organizations in Kentucky, Texas, Arkansas, California and New Jersey face a mass funding halt at the end of the month.

“If the shutdown continues, all these organizations will be left having to consider a spectrum of bad to terrible options, including staff layoffs and, in the worst-case scenario, evictions,” said Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, a Washington-based advocacy organization.

HUD, which funds most of these programs, has been hit not only by the furloughing of 95 percent of its workforce, but also by a recent exodus of top staff members. Just days before the shutdown began, the department’s deputy secretary, Pam Patenaude, resigned in what one person with knowledge of the situation described as a forced exit after clashing with housing Secretary Ben Carson.

Critics said HUD officials inadequately planned for an extended shutdown, failing to recertify more than 1,000 contracts with landlords who provided subsidized housing.

“I am thoroughly disgusted with the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s failure to follow its own contingency plan” for the shutdown, Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., chairwoman of the House Financial Services Committee, wrote in a letter to Carson on Friday.

Waters was particularly critical of Carson for exposing homeless programs, including those providing housing for victims of domestic violence, to financial harm.

A spokesman for Carson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The shutdown has stopped vital funding allocations for public housing repairs, new housing voucher applications and even the processing of post-disaster housing requests from Puerto Rico and several hurricane-ravaged states.

HUD officials often play down concerns about the impact of funding decisions on poor people. But privately, they too are growing increasingly concerned that some tenants and local groups that rely on funding from the department could be stranded if the shutdown lasts even a few more weeks.

Smaller organizations, especially those that serve rural areas, are particularly vulnerable because they often lack endowments, cash reserves or lines of credit that their big-city counterparts can tap.

“We are providing services without getting paid for those services, and eventually that is going to catch up with us,” said Adrienne Bush, executive director of the Homeless and Housing Coalition of Kentucky, which relies on a $1 million federal grant that covers about half its expenses each year.

Bush’s group has not received its January payments, and still has not gotten some of the money it was owed from providing services in 2018. To cover the gap, she has begun to tap a $75,000 cash reserve.

Bush will soon have to stop paying some landlords, which could lead to evictions. To minimize the fallout, she has started to compile a list of owners willing to forgo payments for an extended period.

She sent a letter pleading for help to Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the majority leader. Bush said the shutdown was putting “people’s lives at risk.”

She received an eight-word response and no commitment to help.

“I’ll be sure to pass on your concerns,” Tiffany Ge, McConnell’s legal counsel, replied in an email to Bush.

WASHINGTON — Ramona Wormley-Mitsis got welcome news in December: After years of waiting, the federal government had approved a subsidy that allowed her to rent a three-bedroom house, bracketed by a white picket fence to keep her two autistic sons from bolting into traffic.

Glenn Thrush

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