On Sunday, Republican Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky became the fourth Senate Republican to join Democrats opposing the emergency declaration. JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, the Senate appears poised to pass a resolution to overturn President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border.

It’s a symbol of a nation that used to believe that it had escaped history, or at least strode atop history, but now finds itself trapped by history, and of a people who used to think they were captains of the future, but now are prisoners of the past.” Greg Grandin is a professor at New York University and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.ĪMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now! I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. It’s America’s new myth, a monument to the final closing of frontier.

But even if it remains only in its phantasmagorical, budgetary stage, a perpetual negotiating chip between Congress and the White House, the promise of a two-thousand-mile-long, thirty-foot-high ribbon of concrete and steel running along the United States’ southern border serves its purpose. As the Senate appears poised to pass a resolution to overturn President Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border, we speak with historian Greg Grandin about his new book, “The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America.” Grandin writes in his book, “The wall might or might not be built.

End of the myth greg grandin