Trump Says He Fully Expected to Have Zero Miles of Wall Built After Almost 3 Years, Promises 400-500 More

President Donald Trump was asked if he’d expected more progress on his promised border wall, of which zero miles have been completed, and said this is exactly where he anticipated the project to be when he made the promise in 2016.

During a lengthy photo op at a section of replacement border fence in Otay Mesa Wednesday, Trump was asked: “Did you expect to have more of this done when you were talking about it in 2016?”

“No,” Trump replied, then said he’d envisioned 500 new miles of wall, but would consider stopping at 400 and reevaluating.

“So the number I heard was 500, what we’re going to do is we’re going to stop at anywhere from 400 to 500, and we’re going to see where else we may need something, and we can add pieces to that, but you really won’t know until you stop because you going to have tread paths, you know where they going to go, where are they going to walk,” Trump said.

“So we’re going to get up to about 400, and then we’re going to look and see whether or not we have to go much more than 475, 500. It could be at maximum I would say 550,” Trump added.

As Maxwell Smart might say, Trump has thus far missed it by that much. Trump has completed exactly zero miles of new wall/fence, a fact that he even copped to later in the event.

Asked where the funding for the border fence was coming from, Trump went on an extended riff about Congress trying to “stymie us by saying 1.6 billion, but only for renovation,” and adding that “if we have even a small piece of steel going around that’s called a renovation, because we take the piece of steel out and we put up a 30-ft wall. And so in many ways, that works very much to our advantage.”

And Mexico is still not paying for it.

Watch both exchanges above, via The Washington Post.