Biff_Poindexter
Diamond Member
The Guy Who Spent $30 Million Building Trump’s Wall Is Looking for Buyers
When Tommy Fisher heard the call for a big, beautiful wall, he erected a 3-mile fence along the Rio Grande. Now all he needs is someone to buy it back.
www.bloomberg.com
"For ages, Tommy Fisher has dreamed of building an epic piece of infrastructure. "I was like, ‘This would be really fun. This would be a project that would be remembered, like the Hoover Dam’ Fisher said.
In the first few years after the 2016 election, Fisher spent more than $100,000 on lobbying in Washington and mounted a media blitz. A prototype he built in 2017 was rejected by the Department of Homeland Security, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers initially denied his bid to compete for the contracts at all. But the cable news exposure helped him draw the attention of We Build the Wall (WBTW), a nonprofit founded by Brian Kolfage and co-led by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. In the spring of 2019, WBTW paid him $6.9 million to build its first barrier, the half-mile in New Mexico.
WBTW sent Fisher an initial payment of $1.5 million [for the second wall], for what he says ended up being a $30 million job. But the project was soon overshadowed by the group’s antics. WBTW deployed a kind of human mascot known as Foreman Mike to patrol the site in a hard hat and scout for immigrants. Eventually, Fisher got the sense that Bannon’s gang wasn’t necessarily committed to another wall. After he called WBTW for another payment and it never came, he kicked Foreman Mike off the site, parted ways with the organization.
Once in office, Biden halted construction of Trump’s wall, too, freezing the eleventh-hour building frenzy that had taken place in the runup to Inauguration Day. Fisher’s private 3-mile wall seemed destined to live on as a monument to the nativism, opportunism, and general half-assery of the Trump era."
Wow....just wow.....so this guy is 30 million in hole; after all he did for this country to keep it safe; he was even awarded more land in order to build more wall....and the minute Biden gets in office; he leaves this guy out in the cold....