Professional climbers side-eye Trump’s claim that 20 ‘mountain climbers’ tested his border fencing – By Gabe Ortiz (Daily Kos) / Sept 23 2019
Donald Trump will lie about anything and does lie about everything, from the trivial—remember that time he claimed that the “head of the Boy Scouts” had called him to praise a speech he’d given?—to the genuinely earth-shattering, such as declaring a fake national emergency and swindling billions from the military to pay for something he’d always said Mexico was going to pay for. Now we can include fake mountain climbers among those lies, looks like.
He said last week that 20 “mountain climbers” tested new replacement border fencing, a claim that one professional climber called “preposterous.” Maya Madere, who according to the Daily Beast is “a sophomore at Stanford University who is the fifth-ranked woman boulderer in the nation,” said,“Trump is full of shit as usual.” Kyra Condie, who ranks at number two on that same list, agreed. “I absolutely have not heard of anyone testing sections of border wall,” she said. “It would even be hard to find any of us willing to do anything to help Trump and his efforts in any way.”
Trump claimed in his tall tale to reporters in Otay Mesa, California, last week, “We got climbers. We had 20 mountain climbers. That’s all they do—they love to climb mountains. They can have it. Me, I don’t want to climb mountains. But they’re very good, and some of them were champions. And we gave them different prototypes of walls, and this was the one that was hardest to climb.”
But Ross Fulkerson, called by the Daily Beast “a seven-time member of the U.S. national team who is currently ranked third in the country,” said that maybe Trump was confused—it wouldn’t be the first or 1,500th time—because “’mountain climbers’ would not be the people” to test fencing. “Rock climbers would be far better suited for such a test given we constantly practice climbing up vertical and overhanging walls,” while another professional actually said, “It would be easy for a professional rock climber to get up and over.”
The Daily Beast’s Scott Bixby went above and beyond in contacting various other professionals and agencies about Trump’s claim, and all with no luck. “We live in strange times,” said USA Climbing CEO Marc Norman. “I am not aware of any of our athletes being contracted to do such work. Ironically, I have heard rumors of climbers being contracted by zoos to test animal enclosures, but that is about all.” World Cup-winning climber Jakob Schubert said, “It would be weird that nobody in our community would have talked about it.”
You’d think that footage of the best of the best failing to climb over his fencing would actually be something he’d proudly tout, but, said the Daily Beast, “the administration did not provide any clues as to who or what Trump said scaled the wall.” Questions to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were referred to the Department of Homeland Security, which then said, The fuck do we know? Go ask the White House, “which did not respond to requests for clarification regarding the test’s parameters, participants, or existence.” Probably because it never happened.
