Trump Doesn't Understand How Anything Works, Part 7,489

Trump has come up with a novel way to fund his precious Wall. And by "novel", I mean "bearing no resemblance to anything connected in any way to reality":

The Wall is different than the 25 Billion Dollars in Border Security. The complete Wall will be built with the Shutdown money plus funds already in hand. The reporting has been inaccurate on the point. The problem is, without the Wall, much of the rest of Dollars are wasted!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 24, 2018

"Shutdown money". See, by closing down the government we're saving all this money that we can redirect to the Wall! It's genius, I tells ya, genius!

Or maybe not:

Even though paychecks stop going out to hundreds of thousands of workers, shutting down the federal government actually costs money -- and the longer it goes on, the more it will cost....

After the 16-day shutdown in 2013, Congress authorized an estimated $2.5 billion in back pay and other compensation for as many as 850,000 furloughed workers, according to an Office of Management and Budget report. The event also cost the government $7 million in revenue lost from entrance fees at national parks and a halt to IRS enforcement collections that averaged $1 billion a week.

And, by the way, it's also not great for the economy:

“A week or longer will mean that businesses that depend on these federal employees will start to lose sales,” said Stan Collender, a longtime congressional budget aide who’s now editor-in-chief of thebudgetguy blog in Washington....

S&P Global Ratings said the 2013 shutdown shaved at least 0.6 percent from fourth-quarter 2013 gross domestic product growth, taking some $24 billion out of the economy.

This is the kind of genius it takes to bankrupt a casino, or screw up Obama's economy. I periodically ask myself if there is anything (other than grift) that Trump understands--anything at all. I have yet to come up with a positive answer.