When Donald Trump first announced his big plan for “a great, great wall on our southern border,” he declared, full of the sort of conviction that only a man who thinks he’s getting away with that “hair” could possess, that Mexico would pay for it. So insistent was he that our southern neighbors would actually pony up the dough that, early on in his tenure in the White House, he threw a fit when Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto suggested it was never going to happen, basically telling Nieto to either help him make good on his delusional campaign promise, or to stay home. Later, when it became clear that repeatedly asserting Mexico would cut the U.S. a check for the wall (memo line: “Who loves ya, baby?”) was making him sound as stupid as he looks, Trump changed his story: taxpayers would lay out the money to get construction on the wall underway initially, but Mexico would totally reimburse us for the cost. Shockingly, over time, that story has changed again and again, from Mexico will pay for the wall through import tariffs to Mexico will “pay for [the wall] indirectly through NAFTA,” to today’s new yarn: the wall will pay for itself.

Quoting a line from a story tweeted by Fox News, Trump wrote on Twitter that, “According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the $18 billion wall will pay for itself by curbing the importation of crime, drugs, and illegal immigrants who tend to go on the federal dole . . .” For those who are unaware, the Center for Immigration Studies is a group that “favors far lower immigration numbers and produces research to further those views.” Some of its greatest hits include a thoroughly panned claim that “immigrant households receive 41 percent more federal welfare than households headed by native-born citizens,” and another that immigrants are to blame for global warming. Unsurprisingly, it is a favorite source for members of the Trump administration, particularly senior adviser Stephen “White males should be a protected class” Miller and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was accused on Tuesday by an outgoing ICE official of making “false” and “misleading” statements about immigration, or what he presumably calls “that scourge on society.”

The most recent “study” obviously got a retweet from Big Orange because it perpetuates two of his favorite myths: that immigrants are a drain on the economy, and that his passion project will be financed by anyone other than U.S. taxpayers. Incidentally, when Team Trump was having trouble selling its deficit-busting tax plan, it turned to a similar line of bullshit, with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin producing a one-page report, seemingly typed up on his phone, that claimed the bill would totally pay for itself and then some, despite vast bodies of evidence to the contrary.

Anyway, stay tuned for next week when Trump claims Rex Tillerson will pay for the wall as part of a reverse severance package.

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Trump might actually be serious about hiring Larry Kudlow

Yesterday we had a little chat about Larry Kudlow, the perpetually wrong Reaganite who CNBC’s Jim Cramer claimed was the leading candidate to replace Gary Cohn as Trump’s National Economic Council director. Due to Cramer’s history of flamingly bad calls, and the fact that he is a friend and former colleague of Kudlow, we took his report with a grain of salt. But now Trump has weighed in, and it seems like this bad joke might actually happen, thanks to Kudlow changing his tune on the one opinion that gave him an ounce of credibility.