The Department of Homeland Security exhibit at the Border Security Expo last week in San Antonio, Tex. Credit John Moore/Getty Images

Gail Collins: Matt, thanks for coming by to converse. I should tell our readers that you’re a senior writer at The Weekly Standard and a man of many interests, which I hope you’ll be able to thread into our discussions.

Unfortunately, instead of asking you what you thought of the “Girls” finale, I’ve got to bring up Donald Trump. Lots of people think he had a good couple of weeks, and the conservatives are practically fainting with relief. What say you?

Matt Labash: Thanks for having me, Gail. I remember when you and David Brooks, my former Weekly Standard colleague, used to do your Fred and Ginger routine in this hallowed space. Here’s hoping I can at least limp along like another less nimble Fred, Fred Flintstone.

Gail: I’d make that Ginger Rogers joke about doing everything the guys do, only backward in heels, but neither shoes nor dancing is actually my strong point. So I guess we’re down to Donald.

Matt: Yes, I keep hearing Donald Trump had a great week or two. I haven’t been paying very close attention, to be honest. It’s spring, the D.C. area has finally thawed out, and anadromous shad are running up our rivers to spawn, the mating dance they do each April. (I’m an obsessive-compulsive fly fisherman, and an enthusiastic spawner, besides — two of those interests you mentioned.)

Gail: I can see why you seem to be in such a good mood.

Matt: The way I figure it, in a month or so, the shad will be gone — back out to sea — while Donald Trump will still be here for at least three or four more months before getting indicted.

Gail: Wow, I’ve had a lot of conservative friends who haven’t enjoyed talking about Trump, but you’re the first one on the indictment trail. Personally, I’m not an indictment fan. All I can think about is President Pence.

Matt: But checking the highlight reel, I see our fearless president is inching us closer to yet another unwinnable Middle Eastern adventure. He’s proving he’s not Vladimir Putin’s lap dog by reprising the Cold War, while possibly setting the table for World War III. He’s playing nuclear chicken with Kim Jong-un, one of the few people on the planet who is even more erratic and megalomaniacal than Trump is. And he’s openly throwing shade on his own “brain,” Steve Bannon. So all in all, a pretty calm period by Trump standards. I give him a B .

Gail: Anything you’re happy about? Supreme Court? Tax cuts?

Matt: Sure, I’m very bullish on Neil Gorsuch. He will doubtless be the crowning achievement of the Trump presidency, as there likely won’t be many to choose from. And I suspect I’ll end up liking him even if he does a full Souter — as we conservatives call justices who do ideological head-fakes — just because Gorsuch is an avid fly fisherman. That’s how low my standards have fallen when judging public servants.

Gail: You’ll get tougher. I used to think I’d be happy with anyone who didn’t drive to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof.

Matt: Though I actually do suspect Gorsuch will revere the Constitution, instead of merely regarding it as a Rorschach test that allows him to make bad policy. I appreciate justices who understand in their bones that it’s not their job to make bad policy. That’s why God created the legislative branch.

Gail: I’ve listened to Supreme Court nominees, right and left, talk about how they’re going to respect precedent and the Constitution, and I never take them seriously. It’s just like states’ rights. Everybody believes in states’ rights when the state in question is doing something they like. Otherwise they’ll create a loophole.

To me, Gorsuch is just a very smart guy who won’t allow campaign finance reform and will be trouble for reproductive rights, sane gun laws and lots of other things I believe in. But I appreciate the way you fly fisherpeople stick together.

Matt: Translation: He’s no Merrick Garland. I’d be chafed too if I leaned left, with Republicans playing keepaway with Obama’s Supreme Court pick for nearly a year. But fly fisherperson or not, Gorsuch is still about the best you could expect, a sober-minded selection from a teetotaling president who nevertheless often gives the appearance of making appointments while drunk. Never trust a man who makes a great show of not drinking – he’s almost surely covering for more destructive vices.

Gail: What if he only drinks when his wife is there to watch him, like a certain vice president? Never mind, I’m being grumpy. About those tax cuts ...

Matt: Yes, tax cuts always make me happy, as I maintain that I can waste my money better than the government can. Though I’ll believe them when I see them. It’s kind of hard to cut taxes when you want to pull off a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, beef up our military, build a 2,000-mile wall with “a big, beautiful door,” take “care of everybody” health-care-wise — I could go on. I admit to enjoying Trump’s populist rhetoric on days when I can suspend disbelief. I love The People, even the not-terribly-bright ones who do the Mannequin Challenge on YouTube.

But Trump’s always had a bit of a Bernie problem, in that both Trump and Bernie Sanders are good at theater, not at math. They want to give away everything. I’m a big fan of Santa Claus – tried to believe in him until I was too old to mention (22 years of age), because beneath the pessimistic exterior, I’m a cockeyed optimist. Still, when you become a man, you put away childish things, as Paul wrote in a book that Trump might know as One Corinthians.

Gail: Why do I have such confidence that the wall is a nonstarter? Because it’s such a stupid idea? Because it’s so expensive? Because I firmly believe Trump himself doesn’t give a fig about it? Dunno, but so far I am serene.

On taxes, I just assume he’ll cut them and borrow the money. Republicans like to do that, even though they claim they believe in balanced budgets. And I’m sure Trump’s numbers guys can figure out a way to make it work. Do you disagree?

Matt: I smell cynicism. Perhaps you haven’t read his “Budget Blueprint to Make America Great Again.” I haven’t either. I’m no Paul Ryan — budget talk makes me very sleepy. But clearly you haven’t factored in the potential new revenue stream that has floated the Trump empire for decades: licensing deals. I’m not giving any odds on Republicans balancing budgets with Trump’s wish list, but don’t disallow the possibility that we could raise billions slapping his name in gold block letters on buildings up and down Embassy Row. If you were, say, the ramshackle East Timorese embassy, might you not want to class up your operation a little with Mr. Trump’s name?

Gail: I feel strongly that the Timorese have enough life burdens as it is.

Matt: But you really ought to go easier on the wall. They’re already lining up contractors, including Latino-owned businesses, who are reportedly afraid for their lives with all the death threats and the New Tolerance on the left.

Being a wall-builder promises to be nearly as hazardous an occupation as being a coal miner, a Bering Sea crab-boat deckhand or a conservative speaker on a college campus. (Which reminds me of my favorite endangered species: liberals who are actually liberal, who defend diversity of opinion instead of seeking to repress it.)

Gail: If you’re going to go free speech on me, you will win. I totally defend your right to speak out in favor of the dumb wall.

Matt: Thanks! But you don’t like walls? They can be useful. (See your house, church/state, etc.) Maybe you’d rather have a hospitality center down at the border? Perhaps a cozy little cantina with a Los Lobos cover band and welcome-to-America half-price margaritas? Whether the wall is a symbolic abstraction or an actual, you know, wall — the kind drug lords can climb over and tunnel under — it perfectly illustrates the Trump divide in our country. How he can take what by my lights seems like a nonradical, common-sense idea — enforcing our borders, as most sovereign countries do — and radicalize it. His overheated rapist talk, early on, wasn’t helpful to his cause. But his actual cause (getting a handle on America having final say on who comes into our country and in what order) doesn’t strike me as a radical idea at all. In fact, it’s a pretty good one. Feel free to tell me why he’s wrong.

Gail: Appreciate the offer. He’s wrong because he’s approaching the problem in the most ineffective way imaginable. The wall, if you could build it, would cost more than $20 billion and do little or nothing to stop illegal immigration, which now mainly involves people who overstay their visas. Illegal immigration plummeted during the Obama administration, and we’ve already got border patrol agents all over the place. It’s continued to fall since Trump took over. I will freely admit that part of the reason for the latest decline may be the general international impression that America is now run by a crazy person. Kudos, Donald. If the administration wants to do more, they could mandate that employers use the e-verify system to check whether their workers are all documented. They could make a more concerted effort to track down people who overstay their visas.

The wall, in short, will be a huge, stupendously expensive advertisement to the world that the United States makes bad investments.

Matt: Unless Trump adorns the wall in pink marble and waterfalls in the architectural style he perfected known as Late Eighties Classy. Then some Saudi prince or Chinese industrialist will want to buy it at twice the price, and America turns a tidy profit. I was actually inviting you to explain the downside of Trump vowing to enforce the law of the land, not the wall itself. But that said, I’m totally with you on clamping down on visa overstays, which account for more uninvited visitors than illegal border crossings do. While we’re at it, let’s ditch sanctuary cities and stop sending mixed messages to the world with preposterous Obama-era catch-and-release policies, which resulted in years like 2013, when United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement turned loose 68,000 criminal aliens, a full 35 percent of all they encountered.

Gail: I will admit that I’m in the camp that feels undocumented immigrants who never commit any crimes are not a big problem. In fact, they’ve been a boon to a lot of communities.

Matt: And I will admit that on balance, I like undocumented immigrants. Many of them work twice as hard as native-born Americans (harder than no-account magazine writers, certainly), while sending half their money back home to boot. It’s an arduous life, and I respect them. I’m also well aware of the open-borders crowd’s assertion that undocumenteds commit fewer crimes than American citizens. Which is pretty dopey logic. It’s like saying someone who broke into my house doesn’t misplace my car keys as often as I do. Well, maybe, but they broke into my house. They shouldn’t have been there in the first place in order to misplace my car keys.

Gail: There’s no way I’d pay for a $20 billion wall to protect your car keys. Although I might support a government program to provide you with an app that makes the keys ring when you push it.

It seems to me our borders are well-patrolled already, and I cannot tell you how bored the border patrol folk can be, standing around staring south at nothing all day long. It’s getting very hard to recruit people for the job. Maybe it’ll be easier if we get that pink marble wall you mentioned.

Matt: Or maybe they should just bring a book. I suggest Donald Trump’s 2007 offering, “Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life.” I haven’t read it, but I suspect Trump hasn’t either. One can make a case, as you do, that the physical and fiscal realities of building a wall render the project moronic. Forget the pragmatic hurdles, such as navigating terrain like Texas’s Big Bend country. The eminent domain takings alone that would be required to pull it off would give libertarian-leaners like me cold sweats. But maybe all the flapjaw dedicated to the wall hasn’t been such a bad advertisement for America after all, since illegal immigration hasn’t merely continued to fall under Trump, as you suggest. Some accounts have it down by a whopping 67 percent over last year at this time.

Can Trump claim credit for that because of all the bluster and gunsmoke he’s directed at the subject, before the pink marble has even been quarried? He will, of course. And he’d be a fool not to. Is there any place you’d like to see a wall built? I vote for building one around Silicon Valley. Not to keep illegals out, but to keep the tech nerds in. They’re killing more of our jobs than China or Mexico ever could.

Gail: Why doesn’t anybody ever talk about building a wall along the Canadian border? We have to cut down on all the illegal drug traffic involving people who attempt to get their prescriptions filled at reasonable prices. Terrible problem.

Matt: The list of Canadians I would like to deport is long: Drake, Justin Bieber, Nickelback, and those are just the singers. But I once wrote a 5,400-word piece titled “Welcome to Canada: The Great White Waste of Time.” Canadians were not amused. If anyone builds a wall on our northern border, it will likely be Canada, keeping me out.

Gail: Just want to make sure we don’t carry this into domestic life. I’d hate to come to a point where I’m banned at the border of the Great Kansas Curtain.

It’s been a pleasure talking with you, Matt. Hope we can get together again soon. Meanwhile, enjoy that fly fishing.

Matt: The pleasure was all mine. If they ever wall off Kansas to you, I’ll bring the ladder.