Since Joe Biden started running for president, it’s been easy to dismiss his frequent calls to “restore the soul of the nation” as mostly cosmetic moral gesturing meant to get him off the hook for a lack of vision or bold policy commitments. And now it’s even easier.

Asked point-blank recently what would happen to Donald Trump’s border wall, given it has hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts set for 2021, Biden refused to say he would end its construction, saying merely he was “not going to be spending a lot of money on the wall.” In other words, Biden affirmed that with him in the White House, the United States will continue to pour money and manpower into the controversial project.

What’s remarkable about this is not just that the moronic wall is arguably Trump’s signature policy idea (albeit one he cribbed from the pre-Trump GOP, and that Biden himself once advocated for, in typically rabid style). It’s that the wall is itself a literal physical symbol of the bigotry Biden has spent this entire campaign claiming his simple victory would exorcize from the American psyche, a symbol widely mocked and condemned by liberals as a racist boondoggle.