By the end of the week, Kamala Harris will start selling red caps as campaign swag. Maybe they'll say Make America Grate Again!

Of course, this comes to Axios through unnamed campaign aides, since Harris herself still won't speak to reporters or publish her policy positions:

If she's elected president, Kamala Harris pledges to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on the wall along the southern border — a project she once opposed and called "un-American" during the Trump administration.

Why it matters: It's the latest example of Harris flip-flopping on her past liberal positions such as supporting Medicare for All and banning fracking — proposals that aides say she now is against.

Needless to say, this new position-ish comes with a lot of caveats, with the first being that Harris herself has said next to nothing on this or any other policy as the nominee. It's what she did say at the convention that appears to have forced the campaign to address this, however. In her speech, Harris blamed the border crisis on Trump's opposition to a bipartisan immigration-reform proposal that Harris herself never endorsed, as Senate Republican James Lankford reminded Axios. Harris never once voiced support for the bill, and in fact never got involved in border-security issues, a crisis in which Lankford was closely engaged, calling Harris a "Johnny-come-never" on the issue.

Beside, the compromise bill may have given the Biden administration authorization to spend money on extending the Trump border wall -- but it was not nearly enough:

"It requires the Trump border wall," Lankford told Axios. "It is in the bill itself that it sets the standards that were set during the Trump administration: Here's where it will be built. Here's how it has to be built, the height, the type, everything during the Trump construction."

"Requires" does a lot of heavy lifting here. Trump estimates that it will take $18 billion to complete the project. The compromise bill only authorizes $650 million, which only amounts to a 3.6% down payment on the full wall. At an estimated $46 million per mile, that appropriation would add a grand total of 14 miles of barrier on the southern border. That border stretches for over 700 miles, meaning that this allocation would have covered a grand total of 2% of the problem. 

That's why Trump opposed the bill; it was a bad deal, and it would have ended the political pressure to complete an effective barrier system. The same bill would have normalized massive illegal entries at the level of 2500 a day before emergency security measures could kick in, too. That would have forced the Border Patrol to more or less shrug at nearly one million illegal immigrants a year. 

And in regard to "requires," there's no guarantee that Joe Biden would have spent a dime of that money on construction at all, too. All Congress can do is authorize the spending, but they can't make the executive branch spend it, even if it's earmarked. Congress authorized the border wall in the past, starting in 2006, and it didn't go anywhere in the Obama administration either. 

And like every other flip-flop that the campaign is now trying to float, Harris' public record contradicts it. Axios dug up a February 2020 Facebook post in which Harris calls the border wall "a complete waste of taxpayer money and won’t make us any safer." She has also called the border wall "un-American," and nothing more than a Trump "vanity project," as she told a New Hampshire audience in 2019:

Two years later, as Vice President, Harris came up with a five-point plan to deal with the then-exploding border crisis. None of the five points had anything to do with border security, not even generally:

The strategy is the vice president’s most recent step to address these root causes, and is a core component of the Biden administration’s broader plan released Tuesday to establish a “fair, orderly and humane immigration system.”

The plan is broken down into five pillars but it does not provide a detailed timeline or policy actions to be taken. The pillars include addressing economic insecurity and inequality, combating democratic corruption and promoting respect for human rights. 

The plan also addresses gang violence and crimes, and combating sexual and gender-based violence.

Harris didn't talk about building a border wall until a hot second ago, despite having been assigned the leadership role about the border crisis for over three years. Scratch that -- Harris still hasn't talked about building a border wall. Her aides are leaking the idea as a campaign trial ballon to reporters. 

Now suddenly we are to believe that Harris has gone full MAGA because she'll sign a bill authorizing spending on barriers across 2% of the border. That isn't a flip-flop as much as it is a fugazi. It's a dodge, a deke, a way to try to signal a centrist position while making no real commitment at all. 

Harris will never build the wall, not even the 2% of it her campaign now suggests. This is just another example of her campaign desperately trying to make a cipher into all things for all people while hiding her from reporters who might force her to define herself more clearly.