by Guy Walker

How will Donald Trump finally build his wall? At nearly every campaign rally, he iterated his plans of a gilded hysteria, his fetishized wet dream of this coruscating seventh wonder of the world. Whenever he spoke about it, his mouth tightened and expanded like a gasping sphincter, as if every now and then the pressure builds to uncontrollable levels, and he explodes like a rushing torrent of tics and insults. You can see his face twitch when he reads from a teleprompter, like there’s a profane and haunting beast right at the edges of his skin trying to climb his way out.

This is the real Donald Trump, the one who ran on a promise of ethnic cleansing, pushing 11 million undocumented immigrants just over the other side of his “big, fat, beautiful wall.” But there’s something strange about it all—his obsession with something seemingly so mundane, out there in the desert, is unlike normal fantasies. There’s no reason he would stop with the initial 11 million. The wave of deportation would inevitably spread to all members of the media, everyone who’s ever criticized him on Twitter, Democrats, feminists, all male competition for women or power. He only wants to corral himself away from the rest of the world, him and Ivanka safely locked behind their two-thousand miles of barricaded gold mirrors, his chest hair saturated in baby oil, the sizzling gravity of his tits cooking like two thick steaks in the sun. He wants to personally patrol the entire length of his wall, leaning from side to side as he walks like a human pear, his baggy suit blowing aimlessly in the dry anarchic gasps. His huge red tie hangs like the tongue of a dying dog. But these clothes—this suit and tie—are old garments of a former life that was strictly about business and real estate. Now, he imagines himself in an open robe, hung with little velveteen tassel-balls, a Burger King paper crown propped on his head, gripping an oversized trident still smoking with victory, the triumphant abandonment of the world begging to be touched by him. When he looks up at night, the major constellations have rearranged themselves into a glittery caps-lock pronouncement: TRUMP! #MAGA

There are eight prototypes from six contracting companies being seriously considered, all of which will soon be put through stress tests to better determine what best keeps the colored people out. Contestants will try to climb over, dig under, and hammer their way through. You could call these tests The Trump Games, call them Blood and Soil Olympics, call them Island Stupid, or Wall Madness. It’s government sanctioned theater that has a lot of potential—a Survivor-style reality show where contestants can have flamboyant pseudonyms and side ponytails, give sobbing backstabbing confessionals in front of navy blue curtains, share their family histories on why we should root for them. It’ll be everything the major networks could dream of: everyone in the country will talk endlessly about how much they hate it, but they won’t be able to take their eyes off of it.

The hysteria has nothing to do with keeping the brown-skinned people out. Even if the border was merely a sloppily drawn line in the sand, and every immigrant that stumbled over it were a desiccated serial rapist, Trump supporters wouldn’t be frantically stacking cinder blocks to keep them out. It was never about this particular profession of belief; it’s always been about adding to the bloat of America, nothing more. Support for the man is a different thing altogether. It’s an obsession, a Freudian pathology with insatiable cravings for more. But so is the hatred of him—every bit of it is disgusting and impossible to ignore. It’s as if we all volunteered to be locked in a Hometown Buffet in some indiscriminate strip mall as we consume endless portions of Donald Trump, dipping the oversized ladle back into the mac ’n cheese, gorging ourselves on the American heart attack solidified into human form right in front of us.

This is where the wall enthusiasts feel most comfortable. The wall has nothing to do with keeping America safe from the apparent reign of drugs and crime festering in the squalid enormity south of the border; the wall is an exclamation of nihilistic pedantry, a pointless craving to leave a human scar across the landscape. Even the word itself has a unique distaste when leaving the mouth. Wall. It’s a stretched out grunt, an illogical menacing groan that likely shouldn’t exist. But it does, in all its awfully banal physical form. It’s Monument Todestrieb, a meandering ruin trying to dam up the sky. Our greatest monuments to ourselves have never been about anything practical or worthwhile—they’re always a pharaoh’s desert-hardon magnified into some cumbersome concrete edifice that can be seen from space. Trump’s wall, when viewed from space, will be a hyper-realistic rendering of his dick—a single, wet, Top Ramen noodle. It wanders aimlessly, the stupid thing looking for a purpose all its life, meandering in and out of lost valleys, the staggering confines of freedom waving delicately in the arid breeze.

This is what it’s always been about. A man and his dick palace. When he was in real estate, his buildings were golden phalluses, erect and shimmering in a desolate universe; they’re totems of one man’s inner gilded age, meant to signify not only his good fortune, but his youth and fertility. I fuck in gold! his buildings blurt out from every coruscating edge. But he knows his buildings are a teenager’s joke of giant cocks drawn on the skyline—with the ephemerality of a man’s erection, Trump’s buildings will soon crumble and fall. The Wall, on the other hand, is where he can really make his mark.

The form of the monument changes with the form of the man. Because he’s bulging from all sides and his skin is just seared meat, his monument has changed accordingly. He wants to spill himself across the frontier like a patriarch’s fetid corpse. This is his death drive, his unholy petrified cum statue he has commissioned for himself—or is it of himself. It’s possible it’s both. There’s obviously a precondition here, a vague haunting that’s slowly giving him the shrewdness of a fetus. You can notice it in the little things, the way he drinks water, the way he shows everybody he wrote his name. Trump has been given everything; he’s more powerful than any man before him, and all he wants to do is play in his room, stacking Lincoln Logs in the Oval Office, enthusiastically revving up Hot Wheels and smashing them into Barbie dolls. As each succeeding day nudges Donald Trump closer to death, he turns more and more into a slobbering newborn. Every time he doesn’t shit himself he demands the people applaud. When he said, I just want to play with trucks, his staff brought a Mack truck to the front steps of the White House so he could pretend to drive one, honking the horn with the outstanding enthusiasm of a toddler. The wall is his Lego castle he always wanted to build.

The wall will almost certainly never be built, but the glamorous drama of believing it could be reality would be great for our culture. After all, that’s what it’s always been about. A mile-and-a-half from where the prototypes stand, in the dusty nowhere, there is a “free speech zone”, where protestors can throw tantrums, march in circles in their sealed off paddocks, and finally ease themselves under catharsis and dehydration. But nobody’s fighting for anything—the wall is only a symbol, and not because it won’t function properly for its intended use, but because it’s a wall. It’s the most nihilistic form of tribalism—we are at rock bottom. The already crumbling slab of concrete has brought all ideological encampments to their knees, begging for some outcome, some gilded destiny, or some failure that allows the landscape to remain. Whatever the case, this is the end of us. Evolution ended when we stampeded the world for the concept of a wall in the desert.