WASHINGTON _ The impasse that has closed much of the federal government stems from President Donald Trump's demand for a border wall that no longer bears much resemblance to the project he promised voters.
The "big beautiful wall" he pitched over and over has become a "steel slat barrier" or even a "fence" _ a term he long scoffed at.
But while the rhetoric and the designs have changed, opposition remains constant. Whatever Trump calls it, whatever it might look like, Democrats don't want it and few Republicans in Congress think it's worth the cost.
The collision between the president's demand for $5 billion and the resistance it's encountered triggered the partial government shutdown at midnight Friday. Saturday afternoon, the White House announced that Trump had scrapped a plan to spend Christmas at his resort in Palm Beach, Fla., and would stay in Washington. Congress is in recess, so Thursday is the soonest the shutdown might be resolved.
"I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I'll build them very inexpensively," Trump said when he entered the 2016 campaign for the presidency. "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words."
Mexico sees the wall as an affront. Trump still vaguely insists that Mexico will pay but has offered no plan to make that happen.
Trump's latest iteration is "steel slat barrier," a description he began using in the last pew days as the shutdown deadline loomed. Any hope that would sound more appealing to wall critics was unfounded. The fact that he had long derided a slatted fence approach as inadequate didn't help.
Five days after taking office, he ordered the Department of Homeland Security to start planning the wall. The eight prototypes he inspected in the desert outside San Diego in March are all walls, though one has slats on the lower portion.
"You can name it anything you want," he said Friday. "Whatever you want to call it, it's all the same. One way or the other we're going to get a wall. We're going to get a barrier."
The $5 billion would pay to replace about 115 miles of older fence with taller posts, and expand the border barrier by about 100 miles, homeland security aides said Friday.
A rendering posted on Twitter hours before the shutdown looks much like the fencing he had long derided as inadequate _ rows of metal bollards with sharp points on top.
Trump ultimately wants $18 billion, enough for about 700 miles of barrier. Some _ maybe most _ would replace 654 miles of fence built under a 2006 law.
So far, not one mile of the border is walled fenced off that didn't already have a barrier when Trump took office.
Critics of a border wall have mocked the concept as outdated.
"A massively expensive barrier is nothing more than a 14th century solution to a 21st century challenge," said Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Texas, calling it senseless to close the government at all, let alone over a boondoggle.
"Here's how much I'll vote to pay for Trump's wall: $0. The people I represent in Texas don't want it," Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, incoming chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
The libertarian Cato Institute released a study last week aimed at debunking the assertion that expanding the border wall would curb drug smuggling, citing data showing that most smuggling occurs at ports of entry _ where barriers, detection technology and personnel are already in place.
Rep. Will Hurd, R-Texas., whose district spans nearly 800 miles of border, argued that a $1 billion investment in surveillance and other technology would be far more effective than $5 billion in wall construction.
During the campaign, Trump left the impression he wanted the entire border walled off. Critics accused him of seeking a "sea to shining sea" barrier that made no sense, given the length of the Rio Grande, the 1,500-foot deep Santa Elena Canyon and impassable mountains along the 2,000-mile border that make construction impossible or unnecessary.
It wasn't until September 2017 that he explicitly said the barrier doesn't need to be along every mile.
"It has to be a see-through wall," he said at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Ala. "We are going to have as much wall as we need," he said. "You don't need it all the way. ... You have a lot of natural barriers, etcetera."
More consistent, until this month, was his resistance to the "fence" label.
He bristled when anyone used that term, and took pains to distinguish his vision from the existing barrier or anything else called a fence.
At a conservative "Freedom Summit" in Manchester, N.H., in April 2014, more than a year before he joined the presidential campaign, he dismissed doubters who asked, "How can we possibly build a fence that nobody can climb over? ... I would build a border like you've never seen before. Nobody's climbing over."
In August 2015, he shot back when a rival candidate referred to his proposal as a fence.
"Jeb Bush just talked about my border proposal to build a 'fence.' It's not a fence, Jeb, it's a WALL, and there's a BIG difference!" he said on Twitter.
At a campaign rally in December 2015, a boy in the crowd asked what his wall would look like. Trump offered this non-fence description: "It's going to be made of hardened concrete, and it's going to be made out of rebar, and steel."
In March 2017, Customs and Border Protection issued two requests for proposals, both clearly described as a "wall."
One set of prototypes would be for a "Solid Concrete Border Wall," another set for "Other Border Wall."
The specifications called for designs:
_At least 18 feet tall and, ideally, 30 feet.
_Able to prevent tunneling six feet deep.
_Able to withstand attack by sledgehammer, pickax, blowtorch and other tools for 30 minutes or more.
_"Aesthetically pleasing" from the U.S. side.
In recent days, Trump began trying to fudge _ blurring the semantics in an apparent effort to make his plan more palatable.
"The Democrats are saying loud and clear that they do not want to build a Concrete Wall _ but we are not building a Concrete Wall, we are building artistically designed steel slats, so that you can easily see through it," Trump tweeted on Tuesday.
At a bill signing ceremony on Friday, Trump said he didn't care about the label.
He praised House Republicans for "approving strong border security and the money necessary to take care of the barrier, wall or steel slats."
