The genesis for this “brilliant idea”? According to the campaign website, it’s Trump, though people on Twitter have been suggesting the tactic since before Christmas.

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One thing that you might notice about the gimmick is that the bricks are . . . not cheap. Sending one brick will set you back $20.20. (Get it?) Send two and you save 40 cents. Every brick thereafter is an additional $20.

Twenty bucks seems like a lot for a brick! We’re assuming these are real bricks and not, say, foam promotional bricks, which can be purchased (with imprint) for as little as a penny apiece. (We’re guessing that low price relies upon global networks of manufacturing and shipping, which are obviously anathema to Donald Trump, post-campaign announcement.)

Consider the message that’s implied in this gimmick. The wall isn’t supposed to be made out of brick, mind you: It’s supposed to be “artistically designed steel slats,” a change from the solid concrete panels that Trump repeatedly touted on the campaign trail (before denying touting concrete in particular). So what does the campaign send to Pelosi and Schumer? Super expensive bricks, for some reason.

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How expensive? Let’s calculate.

Trump’s most recent public estimate for the height of the wall is 30 feet, as he said in a phone call with troops on Christmas. It will need to cover some 1,000 miles of the border, as he said repeatedly during the campaign.

A brick is about 3 inches by 4 inches by 9 inches, according to this elegant Australian brickmaker’s website. Maybe American bricks are smaller and less likely to be attacked by dingoes, but let’s use those figures for now. Brick walls are not simply bricks stacked on top of one another; such a design’s susceptibility to being pushed over would make it a rather ineffective barrier. Instead, there’s mortar between each brick, running three-eighths of an inch thick. So the height and length of each brick in the wall, including mortar, is 3.375 inches by 9.375 inches.

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To stretch a brick wall 1,000 miles and 30 feet high at those dimensions, we’d need about 723 million bricks. At Trump campaign brick prices, that’s about $14.5 billion.

A wall that is one-brick thick, though, probably won’t hold up that well. We could run rebar through those holes in the middle to support it. Trump’s motto over the past few weeks has been that walls work as evidenced by the use of walls since medieval times. (Which actually undercuts his case.) Rebar only came into use at the tail end of the medieval era, so let’s just make our wall four bricks thick in better keeping with Trump’s temporal rhetoric.

A $57.9 billion wall: At this point, getting Democrats to approve nearly $60 billion for the wall seems about as likely to be successful as getting the $5 billion Trump’s requesting, so why not aim for the stars?

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There’s one additional problem with the Trump campaign’s brick plan that’s worth mentioning.

“We have set a goal to send 100,000 BRICKS to their offices to prove that WALLS WORK!” the copy on the website reads. In a sense, that would indeed prove the point. One hundred thousand bricks, at the dimensions above, would take up more than 6,200 cubic feet of space.

That’s one and a half of these: