BREAKING NEWS: Just to clarify things, after a few years of saying the opposite, Donald Trump patiently explained to the stupid lying news media yesterday that all those times he said he was going to build WALL between the US and Mexico, and that Mexico would pay for it, he never once said Mexico was actually going to pay for WALL with, like, CHECKBOOK. That's just silly! How could anyone get that from him saying, "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words." Get real. He was simply pronouncing it with the silent "indirectly," like in French.

Or maybe he just imagined he'd send them an invoice for WALL and Mexico would lose it at the bottom of the junk drawer and never pay it, like a common Donald Trump. Oh well, anyhow!

Before flying off to Texas to make grunting noises about the antiquity of wheels, the millions of Americans being killed every day by illegals, and coyotes who just "turn left" and are in the USA bringing in kidnapped women wrapped in blue tape, Trump explained to reporters at the White House that all his fans had been cheering and chanting about anything BUT Mexico directly paying for WALL:

And then everyone in the fake news media got on their computers and started finding all the times Trump said Mexico would definitely pay the USA for a wall, including examples where he said they'd write a check, like when his campaign website said very directly Mexico would make a direct payment of five to ten billion bucks for the wall, or we'd start seizing Mexican immigrants' remittances to their home country, or maybe there were a bunch of other ways to pressure Mexico to pay up, too!

Oh, yes, and he said it on camera, too:

Oh, but he said they "may even write us a check," so BOOM, that means he never said Mexico WOULD write a check, liars.

Also, there were the campaign rallies where he had people chanting that Mexico would pay for the wall, and he beamed and said "100 percent!", but those don't count because he never said it would be a direct payment, now did he?

But everyone in the audience clearly understood Trump meant the wall would be paid for when a still-not-ratified adjustment to NAFTA goes in, maybe, although they shortened it to shouting "Mexico" because wouldn't including some vague stuff about trade deals and trade deficits (neither of which is a "payment") make for a ludicrously unwieldy chant?

Mind you, as the Washington Post's Philip Bump goes to some lengths to demonstrate, Trump really has been extremely vague and all over the place -- to the point of nonsense -- about how the miracle of "Mexico pay for WALL" would come about. In fact, in his very first reference to WALL in April 2015, Trump did claim that closing the trade deficit with Mexico would fund WALL, sort of: "I will take it from out of just a small fraction of the money they've been screwing us for over the last number of years."

Of course, as Bump also points out, that is not actually a way that trade deficits or infrastructure funding even work.

[The] trade deficit is not a function of an imbalance between governments but, instead, of the discrepancy between the value of goods and services purchased from or sold to either country. A reduction in the trade deficit does not generate money that the government can use to pay for a construction project.

You can't simply declare one set of numbers has "paid for" a wholly unrelated thing, no matter how often you insist you can afford that new 60-inch flatscreen because the unemployment rate is way down.

Still, Trump racked up an impressive numbers of ways Mexico would "pay" for WALL, including

• Making Good Deals
• Getting Them To Pay
• Standing Firm
• Being a Business Guy
• Mexico Makes One-Time Payment of $5-10 billion
• Reducing All The Drugs Coming In
• Making Mexico Reimburse Us
• Being Smarter Than Mexican Politicians
• A Tax Or A Payment
• A Reimbursement, In "Perhaps A Complicated Form"
• Solar Panels On WALL
• One of 10 Forms Of Payment, Many Forms Of Payment, I Didn't Say How
• They Will Enjoy Paying

And of course there's our favorite, "in some form," which you will note did not say "a check" so Donald Trump WINS, you dumb libs:

So now all we need is to declare a state of NATIONAL EMERGY and suck some money out of disaster relief funds, and Mexico will have paid for WALL, and maybe also for all the lawsuits that would almost certainly block WALL from being built, and then we can shut down the government again, assuming it has at some point reopened.

[CNN / WaPo / Trump campaign on Archive.Org / WaPo / Atlantic]

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