Tommy Fisher is nothing if not persistent. A contractor and builder, in the southwest, Fisher took one look at Trump’s 2016 promise to build a border wall, and visions of sugarplums with dollar sign wings danced in his head. He had to get some of this. Somehow.
Starting om 2017, Fisher spent over $100,000 in lobbying fees, trying to convince Trump to let him build the wall, claiming he could do it faster and cheaper than anybody else. And got no positive response.
And then Fisher literally got pennies from heaven. A private donor gave him the money to build a 3 mile section of the wall in New Mexico. The private donor? A group headed by Trump former campaign poohbah Steve Bannon, who was running a scam to defraud Trump donors by asking them to donate to build the wall privately, and then absconding with the loot. Fisher built the wall section, and was rewarded with a personal visit by Trump.
Blinded with success, Fisher went in for the kill. He spent more than $30 million of his company’s money to buy 3 miles of privately owned river bank property on the Rio Grande, and put up another 3 mile section of wall. And was finally rewarded for his persistence. In 2020, despite DHS complaints that the bid was not legitimate, Trump steered a $2.5 billion contract to Fisher to complete the wall.
Then the wheels fell off. Biden got elected in 2020, and one of his first acts as President was to stop all construction on the southern border wall. All of those lovely sugarplums with the dollar sign wings began flying out the window. But it got even worse.
Because only cities, counties, states, and the United States government can seize private property under eminent domain, Fisher had to buy the Texas Rio Grande property with his own money. And here’s where the belly laugh comes in.
The stupid fucker bought the land too goddamn close to the goddamn banks of the Rio Grande! After he built the section of wall, the remnants of a freakin’ hurricane blew through. And the resulting land erosion exposed the concrete bases for the wall, making it unstable and untenable.
And so, now Tommy Fisher no longer has a $2.5 billion contract to build the border wall. And he’s desperately looking for somebody to buy 3 miles of river bank property along the Rio Grande in Texas with a wall that’s ready to collapse into the river, just to cut his losses. I can’t stop laughing about the ultimate price of a toxic combination of greed and incompetence.
But here’s the silver lining. Thank God he never got to finish the wall, it would have cost more to repair than it cost to build.
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As the song says, “Instant karma’s gonna get you” and this might not have been instant but it came pretty damned quick. This is the first I’ve learned that this dude shelled out thirty million of his OWN money on this. It might have seemed like a good bet at the time but he was still a damned fool. I could get into details but it’s late, and the bottom line is that at best he had to have known he’d be facing all manner of court challenges over the placement of his wall. And I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if he didn’t get engineering studies HE solicited that told him what he was doing wasn’t going to hold up. Of course, getting that big federal contract would mean a huge stream of money to keep shoring the thing up. Or rebuilding it – he probably had a PR plan ready if mother nature caused it to topple to blame it on Antifa or something!
I hope he goes bankrupt. I really do and if that sounds mean I have no fucks to give.
Well, he definitely got what he payed for and more … Trump has left a glaring trail of BS so slimy it glistens in the high noon sun, like a warning flag, so this guy’s dream, made of Trump-like fairy dust and a wall of ignorant greed …
Most of the wall bush built was either far from the river or on top of an already built levy. Giant rivers even when controlled can be powerful things. The Rio Grande is a powerful river that can sweep away all sorts of construction. I have seen it myself.
Serves him right. I hope he never finds a buyer. The sooner the wall falls into the river the better, but he will need to clean it up. You can’t block a river. That’s illegal.
Dare we hope Fisher Construction will be going out of business? Couldn’t happen to a nicer a-hole.
P.T. Barnum definitely had the rethug party in mind when he declared that “there’s a sucker born every minute.”