Despite vowing to revisit the idea of closing the US-Mexico border in a year’s time, Donald Trump’s retreat from his threat this week served as the latest example of his inability to address the signature issue of his presidency.

Throughout his first two years in office, Trump has cast a sustained spotlight on the border while sounding the alarm over immigration, in the hopes of enacting the restrictive agenda that helped propel him to the White House in 2016.

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“Putting together the president’s claims of cultural threat from immigration with his vilification of nonwhite immigrants, these statements suggest support for white nationalist ideas,” Jayashri Srikantiah and Shirin Sinnar, both law professors at Stanford Law School, wrote in an essay identifying white nationalism as the driver of Trump’s immigration policy.