WASHINGTON – As a new book details his efforts to stop illegal immigration, President Donald Trump claimed Wednesday he did not propose lining the Mexican border with a moat filled with snakes and alligators.

"Now the press is trying to sell the fact that I wanted a Moot stuffed with alligators and snakes, with an electrified fence and sharp spikes on top, at our Southern Border," Trump tweeted, misspelling the word "moat."

"I may be tough on Border Security, but not that tough," the president added. "The press has gone Crazy. Fake News!"

Trump later sent out the same tweet with the correct spelling of "Moat," though he needlessly capitalized it.

The book says that, in addition to closing the entire southern border, Trump at one point suggested radical and even violent ways to stop illegal crossings – including the snake-and-alligator-filled moat as well as shooting migrants in the legs.

"Privately, the president had often talked about fortifying a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators, prompting aides to seek a cost estimate," according to the book "Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration."

Trump "wanted the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh," it adds.

None of these ideas came to fruition, according to the book set to be published Tuesday.

Speaking with reporters after his Wednesday tweet, Trump again denied proposing to build a moat or an electrified, spiked fence to keep out migrants. "Never said it, never thought about it," he said.

As for the term "moat," Trump said: "It's not a word I use."

(Trump also said the authors of the book are from The Washington Post, but that is incorrect; they work for The New York Times.)

The authors, Times reporters Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis, also write that Trump backed off his public proposal that border guards shoot rock-throwing migrants because staff members told them that would be illegal.

"But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down," the book said. "That’s not allowed either, they told him."

Trump threw out these ideas as he considered a plan to shut down the nation's southern border, a proposal also opposed by aides as well as congressional lawmakers who said it would wreak havoc with the economy. The president also abandoned that idea, grudgingly.

Trump did, however, make changes at the department of homeland security, including the removal of Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.