Donald Trump has been somewhat famous, or infamous, for proclaiming over and over again that he will build a “great” wall on the Mexican border, and that he will get the Mexicans to pay for that wall.

Which is, as any half-ways sensible person knows, complete and utter nonsense.

But the question the media has failed to ask – and I hold them accountable for this failure – is HOW the Donald intends to get the Mexicans to pay for the wall that he proposes to build.

Not that they would get an answer. He would probably just tell them that he is such a great negotiator, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Of course, the last people to try to build a wall around an entire country was the East Germans, who built the “Zonengrenze” wall along the entire border with West Germany – not to be confused with the Berlin Wall, which although part of the intra-German border, was its own construction – and we know how that turned out.

The problem with a wall is that, unless you’re prepared to do what the East Germans did do – which is to shoot people clearing the border fence on sight – then it’s not really going to be effective.

On top of which, as most informed people know, there are now more Mexicans leaving the United States than are entering it. In other words, we have now achieved a net outmigration. Building a wall along the border is not going to help that issue.

But we long ago went to the silly season in this election, and it happened almost the moment that Donald Trump entered the race. Last week Trump literally said that he could “shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any votes.”

Trump’s narcissistic personality disorder is starting to take on unprecedented dimensions. I mean, let’s face it: almost all politicians are narcissists at some level, or they wouldn’t want to be in the political arena. But Trump’s level of narcissism is unprecedented. He probably literally believes that he could shoot someone and not lost votes.

What started as an exercise in obscene self-promotion – with Trump riding down an escalator in front of a crowd that was mostly paid for – as now morphed into phenomenon where people are taking this clown seriously as a Presidential candidate.

Honestly, I never thought I would live to see this day.

I suppose the best thing that could happen here is that the Donald tears the Republican party apart. Lord knows that they deserve it. Having sowed the seeds of hate and fear for decades – starting with the despicable Lee Atwater[1] and his use of Willie Horton to sabotage the Dukakis Presidential campaign.

[1] Atwater, of course, had a literal deathbed conversion in which he repented some of his actions in the political arena. Atwater converted to Catholicism, and issued a number of public and written letters to individuals to whom he had been opposed during his political career. In a February 1991 article for Life magazine, Atwater wrote that “My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood.” The article was notable for an apology to Michael Dukakis for the “naked cruelty” of the 1988 presidential election campaign.