Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump joked Thursday that his U.S.-Mexico border wall will be known as “The Great Wall of Trump” while saying the country does not need a similar wall on the border between the United States and Canada.
“It’s something that can be absolutely done, not done at tremendous cost,” Mr. Trump said on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria.” “You know, it’s been costed by politicians and they came out with these outrageous numbers. As you know, I know how to build. I know how to get it done. We’ll have a great wall. We’ll call it the Great Wall of Trump. We’ll have a great wall and it’ll be — it’ll be actually — it can be a good-looking wall, as walls go, but we will have a really terrific wall and it’ll be done for the right price.”
Asked later by host Maria Bartiromo if Mr. Trump will indeed put his name on it, he replied: “No, I’m only — I’m only being facetious.”
He had brought up the Great Wall of China as a point of comparison and said there didn’t need to be a similar wall on the United States’ northern border.
“We don’t need a wall there. It’s a much different situation. And frankly in terms of Canada … you look at what’s going on with Canada, it’s a much different kind of situation that we have with Canada,” he said. “We have to police it; we have to be very vigilant; we have to be careful. But also the length, you’re talking about a tremendous length, a tremendous distance.”
“You know, interestingly, the wall on the southern border, it’s — really, if you think it’s a thousand miles. It’s 2,000 miles, but a lot of it — some of it’s done — it’s done poorly by the way, what they’ve done is very poor, very poor work, [a] very poor job, very — not much of a wall,” he said. “But you also have natural terrain which is automatically a barrier, which is a good thing. So you’re talking about a thousand. And then you look at the Great Wall of China that was built 2,500 years ago. It’s 13,000 miles. And we’re really talking about something … a little more than a thousand miles.
“You know, for years, they’ve wanted to do it,” he said. “I don’t know if you know, even Hillary Clinton, I mean, for years they’ve wanted to do it, but they could never get it figured out how to get it done. And, you know, one of the things that stopped it was the environmental impact statement. Can you believe it?”
“They couldn’t get an environmental impact statement completed to get the wall built,” he said. “That’s a whole ’nother conversation.”
• David Sherfinski can be reached at dsherfinski@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.