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"The wall is probably $8 billion, which is a tiny fraction of the money that we lose with Mexico," Donald Trump said. Trump puts a price tag on his wall: 8 billion

For the first eight months of his campaign, one of Donald Trump's most steady and consistent messages has been that he will build a wall on the United States' southern border and make Mexico pay for it.

On Tuesday, as voters in New Hampshire trekked to the polls to cast the first primary ballots, the Republican candidate gave his first estimate.

"The wall is probably $8 billion, which is a tiny fraction of the money that we lose with Mexico," Trump told MSNBC's Tamron Hall in an interview Tuesday.

Explaining how he came up with that figure, Trump said, "all I'm doing is I'm multiplying the number of miles by a certain num—it's a very simple number ... I'm very good at that."

"What we're doing is we have 2,000 miles, right? 2,000 miles long, but it's not 13,000 miles like they have in China," he said, referring to the Great Wall. "And of the 2,000, we don't need 2,000, we need a thousand because we have natural barriers, et cetera, et cetera.

"And I'm taking a price per square foot, you know, and a price per square mile. And it's a very simple calculation," he continued with his explanation. "I'm talking about precasts going up probably 35 to 40 feet in the air. That's high, that's a wall. It'll actually look good. It'll look, you know, as good as a wall is going to look. And it's going to do the trick. But we're going to have big, beautiful doors in the wall and people are gonna come into the country."

Asked how he would get Mexico to pay for the wall, Trump on Tuesday replied simply, "You tell 'em, 'You're gonna pay for it.'"

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderon previously blasted Trump's plan to force his country to construct the wall, telling CNBC that Mexico will not pay a cent for his "stupid wall."

Trump on Monday insisted that Calderon was wrong. “He’ll pay. Trust me, he’ll pay,” Trump said. “We have such a trade imbalance with Mexico. We have such a trade deficit. The wall is peanuts compared to that number.”

And he upped the ante on Tuesday, saying, "I heard he said that we will not pay. Guess what? The wall just got higher."