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Donald Trump’s pseudoscientific ramblings have never failed to shock or horrify.
Now — from the man who suggested injecting disinfectant to cure Covid-19 and suggested that global warming doesn’t exist because cold temperatures do — we have a new contribution to Trump’s book of fact-free claims.
In an interview with “Fox & Friends” over the weekend, Trump continued his yearslong habit of downplaying the impact of climate change. Dismissing President Joe Biden’s recent warnings about global warming, he suggested that rising sea levels could actually have a silver lining: “a little more beachfront property.”
The single biggest threat — not global warming. When they say that the seas will rise over the next 400 years — one-eighth of an inch, you know. Which means, basically, you have a little more beachfront property, OK? Think of it. The seas are going to rise. Who knows? But this is the big threat.
I watched Biden the other night [say], ‘It’s the greatest existential’ — he loves that word, because it’s a big word and ... he doesn’t even know what the hell the word means. He goes, ‘It’s the greatest existential threat to our country.’ Global warming.
Watch Trump’s remarks on Fox News here:
Leave it to Trump to insult someone’s intelligence in a diatribe exposing his own glaring delusion.
To say nothing of his claim that “existential” is a big word, sea levels are rising at a rate much faster than an eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average sea level has risen by an eighth of an inch per year since 1993, so Trump only overshot by a multiple of 400. Then we get to the “beachfront property” remark — an ignorant, arrogant and fundamentally cruel quip that truly epitomizes the risks in electing a shoddy real estate mogul-turned-reality TV star as president.
To state the obvious, because we can never assume that Trump or his followers know: Rising sea levels do not create new beachfront property.
To state the obvious, because we can never assume that Trump or his followers know: Rising sea levels do not create new beachfront property.
What sea level rise does tend to do, though, is cause harm and devastation. It makes coastal communities more susceptible to flooding and shoreline erosion, which creates safety hazards for residents and threatens local infrastructure. It’s also a driving force behind global migration, which you might think Trump would know, given his bigoted obsession with immigration.
He also lives in Florida, a state that is literally facing an existential threat in the form of rising sea levels. It really is remarkable that Trump — with his purportedly high IQ that he claims to have inherited genetically — doesn’t seem to understand this stuff.
For a man who brags about his intellect, his inability to grasp even basic facts about climate change adds to a mountain of contradicting evidence.