Donald Trump has revealed his much-vaunted border wall with Mexico will be shorter than originally planned and... transparent.
Speaking aboard Air Force One in a conversation reporters were originally led to believe was off the record, the President argued the threat of large bags of drugs being thrown over the barrier necessitated the move.
He said: “One of the things with the wall is you need transparency. You have to be able to see through it. In other words, if you can’t see through that wall — so it could be a steel wall with openings, but you have to have openings because you have to see what’s on the other side of the wall.
“And I’ll give you an example. As horrible as it sounds, when they throw the large sacks of drugs over, and if you have people on the other side of the wall, you don’t see them — they hit you on the head with 60 pounds of stuff? It’s over.
“As crazy as that sounds, you need transparency through that wall. But we have some incredible designs.”
‘Transparency’ seems to be a current favourite word for Trump, who is known for his limited vocabulary and rambling, fractured sentences.
It’s been thrown around by the President and others in their defence of his son over a meeting with a Russian lawyer, the details of which were made public by Don Jr when he tweeted a series of emails on Tuesday.
Trump, who made building a “big beautiful wall” a central pledge of his election campaign, also admitted it would not need to cover the entire US/Mexico border as he has previously stated.
He said: “But we are seriously looking at a solar wall. And remember this, it’s a 2,000 mile border, but you don’t need 2,000 miles of wall because you have a lot of natural barriers.
“You have mountains. You have some rivers that are violent and vicious. You have some areas that are so far away that you don’t really have people crossing.
“So you don’t need that. But you’ll need anywhere from 700 to 900 miles.”
Around 600 miles of the border are already protected by barriers but it is not clear if this is included in the length Trump refers to.