1) Naming rights. Sell the right to sponsor different sections of the wall. Imagine the name recognition value of, say, Doritos on a section of the wall. And the publicity value of hundreds of young people walking around wearing "I scaled the Doritos Border Wall" T-shirts. There would be a mad scramble to lasso the rights to many sections. In fact, it would probably be so successful that companies like Western Union might even advertise on the walls of tunnels under the wall so that migrants would know immediately the best place to wire money back to Honduras.
2) Reality TV. "Survivor: the Migrant Caravan," and that's just for starters. Send a camera crew and two "tribes" down to Honduras and follow them north with various challenges along the way, such as the "Don't drink the water" challenge in which the prize is a six-pack of Aquafina, and the losing team is filmed with Montezuma's Revenge. And that's just the beginning. Advertisers would flock to "Beeg brother," with the revenue going to buy voluminous volumes of steel slats.
3) Solar panels: Build a wall and cover it with solar panels. According to the Solar Panel Association, such a wall, with an initial cost of $5.7 billion, would pay for itself in 60 years, 30 if giant floodlights are shined on the wall to make sure no migrants are climbing over it..
4) YouTube advertising. Build a 2,000-mile, 150 foot wall with a six-inch wide strip on top and have border patrol agents ride motorcycles along the top with go pro cameras strapped to their helmet, then play the videos on YouTube where they're sure to go viral, and raise $5.7 billion in advertising revenue. There might even be enough left over to pay for the funerals of dozens of border patrol agents who fail to negotiate the turn at Yuma, Arizona.
5) Build the wall and make Russia pay for it, by convicting Russia of meddling in the 2016 election and seizing all the Trump properties that were purchased by oligarchs.
6) Tax the rich. Impose a 70 to 80 percent tax on those making more than $10 million a year. Oh wait, the money raised that way has to go to pay for repairing bridges and roads, not creating a useless wall.
7) Commemorative bricks. Allow families to purchase an engraved brick with the name of a loved one who has been a victim of violence perpetrated by an illegal immigrant who snuck over the southern border. This might take several decades, since there would only be a potential group of five or six such bricks. More such bricks might be available if families who lost a loved one to the opioid epidemic were allowed to purchase them, but such bricks would need an asterisk noting that 95 percent of fentanyl sold on the black market in America came from China.
8) You were expecting more? Trump can't even come up with one way to pay for the wall. Thank God.
