In March, John Oliver did a great piece on the Trump Wall. Watch it below!

The cost for the wall is said by Donald Trump to be at most 12 billion dollars. John Oliver concludes that it will cost at least 25 billion dollars, plus maintenance.

Shortly after this show was aired, Donald Trump posted an explanation as to how he intends to make Mexico pay. To read it, you need to check the box and state that you are not a robot. Because robots are not allowed to read this text. It’s a bit like stating that you are above 18 to get access to other types of content.

The idea is as follows: 24 billion dollars are sent from people within the U.S. to other people within Mexico every year. By threatening to stop the flow of this money, he will make Mexico pay between five and ten billion dollars once.

This is how: ”no alien may wire money outside of the United States unless the alien first provides a document establishing his lawful presence in the United States”.

They claim the 24 billion dollars are sent primarily by people being illegally in the U.S., which he obviously doesn’t know – it’s a guess. However, even if that were the case, his whole idea is based on the assumption that there be no way for these people to send money via a proxy. As if these people had no friends, employers or family that could perform the transmission for them.

He then continues to claim that only Mexico stands to lose by enforcing trade restrictions, which of course is not true. If you reduce the amount of goods being imported, prices will go up, which will affect the U.S. citizens in a negative way. Though it is true that the party with the highest income from its export usually is the winner, that doesn’t automatically make the other party a loser. It’s not that simple.

Finally, it becomes really weird. In order to put pressure on Mexico, he intends to cancel not only visas for people that work in the U.S., but also for business travelers and tourists.

Let’s take that again, shall we?

A person from Mexico that wants to visit the U.S. for a conference, a business deal, some relaxing golf or a visit to children and grandchildren will be denied entry because that is how Donald Trump intends to force their neighboring country into paying for something they don’t need or want.

This behavior has never been seen in the civilized world in modern days. This type of embargos have been used against nations that violate human rights, but never as diplomatic blackmail.

Donald Trump intends to run the U.S. as a  17th century Fürst.

By enforcing his embargo, which quite honestly I don’t think he will, but let’s assume that for once he is truthful, he would alienate every Western country in the world. He would also force us to act, because of the unfair treatment of a country that is a founding member of the U.N.. The lease you can expect is a boycott of American goods by civil rights organizations.

To use Trump’s vocabulary, it will probably be ”ugly”.

Not at all ”a beautiful, beautiful thing”.