President Donald Trump continued feeding the weeks of speculation about whether he would declare a national emergency to begin construction on his promised border wall in order to circumvent congressional approval.

The president hinted Friday that he might make the controversial announcement during the State of the Union speech as he spoke to reporters about wall that had already been built on the border.

"We're building the wall," the president said, "people don't understand that."

"They're starting to learn," he explained. "We're spending a lot of money that we have on hand. It's like in a business, we have money on hand, and we're building, I would say we have a hundred and fifteen miles of wall, maybe a little bit more than that very shortly."

"But we will be looking at a national emergency because I don't think anything's gonna happen," he said later in the briefing. "I think the Democrats don't want border security."

"And when I hear them talking about the fact that walls are immoral and walls don't work, they know they work," he added.

The president has been threatening to use the emergency order in order to prevent Democrats from blocking funding to his border wall since before the partial government shutdown began.

Critics have noted that if he did declare a national emergency for that purpose that it would almost certainly be met with legal challenges.

Here's the video of Trump hinting at an emergency declaration: