Image: Screengrab via The Hill

President Donald Trump’s increasingly fantastical wall on the border with Mexico—which will be up to 65 feet tall, impossible to cut through, covered in solar panels and aesthetically pleasing from the US side—will now also be a “see-through wall.”


Per CNN, Trump told attendees at a campaign rally in Huntsville, Alabama on Friday, “If you can’t have vision through it, you don’t know who’s on the other side ... You need to have a great wall, but it has to be see-through. We’re looking at different samples already of see-through walls. And, I think also, to be honest with you, a see-through wall would look better.”

“I’m going to out and look at them personally, going to pick the right one,” the president continued, referring to the wall which will supposedly be invisible and thus technically impossible to look at.


Trump also took the time to clarify that the beautiful, invisible solar wall would not be needed across terrain features like rivers and mountains, which are already walls, sorta:

You have a lot of natural barriers, et cetera. Somebody said, ‘Well, what are you going to do, you going to build that wall in the middle of the river? ... That nobody can go in? Are you going to build that wall on the mountain?’ I said, ‘You don’t need the wall on the mountain. You have a mountain which is a wall.’ But we are going to build a wall. It is coming along great.

The president also expressed his fear that without the wall, drug dealers could use catapults to throw “a hundred pounds of drugs” and “hit somebody on the head.”

As the Dallas Morning News noted, some of the 700 miles of barrier already in place along the US-Mexico border is already see-through, but that’s because those sections are fencing, not a wall. While Trump has not stated what kind of material the invisible section of the wall might be built out of, per the paper, he has ruled out concrete.


In case you needed further clarification on why this is a baby idea for proud Truck Nutz owners and frequent tenants’ association complaint filers, there’s no technical reason the wall would need to be “see-through.”

Border patrol officials already have “an awful lot of long-range and photographic and video equipment” that “gives them the ability to look fairly deep into the Mexican side of the border, in case anyone tries to come across illegally,” Cato Institute analyst Patrick Eddington told Wired.


Moreover, see-through or not, a wall of any height is well within the range of drug smugglers’ amazing variety of drug-launching devices, some of which are trebuchets capable of launching bales of narcotics 100-150 feet in the air.

One advantage of the transparent wall concept, however, is that Trump may be able to convince some of his supporters the thing is already there and you just need to squint really hard to see it. See? The real wall was the empty promises he made along the way.


[CNN]