Donald Trump is escalating his lifelong battle with his arch nemesis: the wind. As we enter hurricane season, Trump has abandoned peace talks with the only thing in the universe capable of producing more hot air than him and has pivoted to threats of violence. Axios is reporting that Trump has been asking advisors about the possibility of dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes to destroy them and… somehow I am not surprised by this in the least.
Admit it, I could tell you that Donald Trump announced that he as appointing a very smart car to the Federal Trade Commission and you'd probably think, "well that tracks. I imagine the car can talk and that's probably very convincing to him. Do you think he even has a driver's license? It's possible that all cars inspire confusion and awe in him. Ever since he stumbled into Marty McFly's DeLorean and magic'd himself back to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, Donald Trump has treated automobiles as if they are gods walking amongst us. Or, at the very lest, robots in disguise."
Still, "let's blow up a hurricane with a nuke" is definitely a little bit farther down the "Actual Villain versus Cartoon Villain" scale than Trump is normally. What in the Pinky and the Brain hell is this? Am I microdosing? One week he's declaring himself King of Israel and everyone looks around awkwardly and double-checks the Wikipedia page for the Left Behind series; the next week he's like, "I'm going to straight up murder a windstorm." You gotta admit, he keeps you on your toes; but then again so does a hangman.
According to Axios, during a hurricane briefing Trump reportedly said, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we nuke them?" and if anything inspires confidence in a leader, it's someone who declares, "I got it. I got it." It's like when you're at your friend Bernie's for the weekend and, whoops, Bernie turns out to be life-deficient, and your stupidest friend is like, "I got it. I got it. Why don't we put sunglasses on him and carry him around." The difference, of course, between swanning around a house party with a festive corpse and dropping a bomb in the eye of a hurricane is that only one of them will work and have eye got news for you about which one it is.
"I wanna bomb a hurricane" comes from the same galaxy brain school as "let's nuke a volcano to create a nuclear winter to prevent global warming" and "let's blow up the moon to prevent sea levels rising and also because I hate the moon!" Thoughts and prayers to the two synapses trapped in Trump's head who are tap dancing as fast as they can to produce this kind of content.
Tired: Send money and supplies to Puerto Rico; support FEMA; address climate change.
Wired: Fight Mother Nature in hand-to-hand combat like the end of Moana.
Trump has apparently read the report on Operation Blown Away and thinks it balderdash:
Now, you can ask yourself whether you want to believe multiple White House sources and a 2017 National Security Council memo or the man who took time out of his meetings with six other world leaders to tweet about himself in the third person. Really, the truth is anyone's guess.
The White House has decided not to officially confirm or deny that Trump said this, which is a fascinating choice, but at least one senior administration official is trying to look at the bright side. Said official told Axios, "his goal—to keep a catastrophic hurricane from hitting the mainland—is not bad. His objective is not bad," which is the kind of thing you say when your cat brings you a dead bird as a gift. A for effort! Someone in Michelle Obama's White House really got on the horn with Axios and had the Category 5 gaul to say "Yes, the president has asked about the possibility of trying to knock a hurricane out with a big nuclear punch and, no, he probably does not realize that just because hurricanes have names doesn't mean that they have corporeal forms or the ability to vote Democrat; you've got to give him credit for wanting to stop the storm, though! He's like Bruce Willis in the movie Armageddon except instead of an asteroid it's a swirling vortex of wind and there is no catchy song and Billy Bob Thornton is not involved at all, but beyond that we're talking about the exact same thing."
I don't know how this happened but somehow Trump and his cronies have got me out here siding with hurricanes? I've begun to suspect that Odysseus' shipmates who release the winds in The Odyssey were perhaps unfairly maligned by history. I have fundamentally misunderstood the message of Bob Dylan's song "The Hurricane" and I'm ready to take action!In the words of those great social justice warriors, the Weather Girls, the temperature's rising, barometer's getting low; according to all sources: THE STREETS THE PLACE TO GO.
R. Eric Thomas R Eric Thomas is a Senior Staff Writer at ELLE.com, home of his daily humor column "Eric Reads the News," which skewers politics, pop culture, celebrity shade, and schadenfreude.
