The Atlantic

What a Border-Wall GoFundMe Campaign Says About America

A far-fetched online fund-raiser shows the lengths to which Americans will go to circumvent the country’s broken systems.
Source: Mario Tama / Getty

The federal government has partially shut down, and Donald Trump still doesn’t have money for a border wall. Earlier this week, the president rejected a funding bill that would keep nine federal departments operational, and Congress scrambled to find a fix by a deadline of midnight on Friday—but to no avail. The rejected bill didn’t include a desired $5 billion for Trump’s long-promised wall along America’s southern border.

With control of the House of Representatives set to switch to the Democrats in the new year, the odds that Trump will have popped up to collect money for the wall directly from Trump supporters online, with the purported intent of passing that money to the White House or the Department of Homeland Security. The most successful one, a GoFundMe with a background in , has raised more than $14 million. It aims to raise at least $1 billion.

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