Yeah, sure, Mr. Trump, Mexico will pay for the wall you want to erect at the border. That’s what you have been promising since you launched your presidential campaign by calling Mexicans rapists and criminals, remember?

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively," you said on June 16, 2015. "I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall.” 

Well, no, Mr. Trump, it’s not happening. For all your bluster and sorry display of cheap machismo, that promise of yours was just so much hot air.

It is us, the U.S. taxpayers who will end up picking up the tab for the new President’s absurd pet project. And at an estimated cost of $25 billion it won’t be exactly chump change.

According to Trump’s people, they will ask the Republican Controlled Congress to come up with the funds to pay for the border barrier. But the idea of asking taxpayers to pony up billions of dollars to finance a dumb project with no other purpose than assuaging the fears of racists and nativists is bound to not go down well with the Democratic opposition.

 “If President Trump asks Congress to approve taxpayer dollars to build a wall, which he has always said would not be paid for by U.S. taxpayers,” said in a statement Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy, the Appropriations Committee Top Democrat, “we will carefully review the request to determine if these taxpayer dollars would be better spent on building hospitals to care for our veterans, roads and bridges to help taxpayers get to work, and for N.I.H. to find cures for cancer.”

Certainly, not a difficult determination to make.

Trump, of course, is not admitting that the promise around which he built his campaign is nothing more than demagoguery. He is insisting that Mexico will end up bankrolling the wall.

 “We’re going to get reimbursed,” Mr. Trump told the New York Times on Friday. “But I don’t want to wait that long. But you start, and then you get reimbursed.”

Mexicans, not surprisingly, have no plans to pay at any time for what former President Vicente Fox has called Trump’s “racist monument.”

“Trump may ask whoever he wants, but still neither myself nor Mexico are going to pay for his racist monument. Another promise he can't keep,” Fox tweeted on Thursday.

Racism, misogyny, demagoguery, disrespect for the Constitution and shameless lies were the defining characteristics of the president-elect campaign. And –bet on it-- they will also be the trademarks of his presidency.

 It would be great if we could build a wall to protect Mexico, Latin America and the world from the arrogance and bigotry of the new president and his band of crusty old generals, plutocrats and prehistorical politicians. That would be a project worth supporting no matter the cost.