In January 2017, President Trump had a problem. He’d staked his campaign on a promise to build a border wall “from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico,” an idea that even his allies didn’t take seriously. Now he had to figure out how to turn his trollish slogan into an actual policy. “It was incredibly unpopular except with maga diehards,” says Brad Jones, a political-science professor at UC Davis. The wall faced immediate legal and logistical setbacks. Despite Trump’s claims that Mexico would pay for it, he demanded the money from Congress, which responded with a 35-day government shutdown, the longest in U.S. history to that point. The wall became a punch line, underscoring the president’s ineptitude. It seemed increasingly unlikely that any of it would ever get built.

Nine years later, about 450 miles of physical barrier, new or newly replaced, can be seen stretching across the southern border. It is a fraction of what Trump promised and has done little to stop migrants from attempting to cross. But it’s having some of its intended effect: Border Patrol officers use a dystopian term, “wall falls,” for people who plummet to their deaths trying to scale the up-to-30-foot-high barricade. Some hoped the wall would be disassembled when Democrats took control of the federal government. Instead, the Biden administration, after first halting building it, picked up construction where Trump left off, cowed by accusations of being soft on immigration. “The wall became the new normal,” Jones says. “I don’t see it going away.”

Trump’s border wall is an analogy for, and a concrete reminder of, how even the most preposterous authoritarian fancies can quietly become the political shorthand for taking public panics seriously. From there, it’s a short trip to becoming government policy and the material reality that shapes our........

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