Earlier on Thursday the former president of Mexico Vicente Fox said there’s no way he’s going to “pay for that f***ing wall,” referring to Donald Trump’s oft-repeated campaign promise to build a wall dividing the Mexico-U.S. border.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer used this as a backdrop to ask the Republican frontrunner how exactly he’d get the wall built given the pushback from Mexican leaders—past and present.
“I will, and the wall just got 10 feet taller,” Trump responded, frustrated over the “filthy, disgusting” language Fox used.
“We have a trade deficit with Mexico of $58 billion a year and that doesn’t include all the drugs that are pouring across and destroying our country," he said. "We’re going to make them pay for that wall. Now the wall is $10 billion-$12 billion if I do it, if these guys do it it'll end up costing $200 billion,” he said, “you need 1,000 miles, the Great Wall of China … is 13,000 miles, we need 1,000.”
“Mexico will pay for it because they’re not doing us any favors, they could stop all this illegal trade if they wanted to immediately … it’s a small portion of the kind of money we lose and the deficits we have with Mexico,” he added.