Sharks, #Trump claimed, were attacking more than usual (not true) & posed a new risk bc boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which cause them to sink bc they’re too heavy (really, really not true—the world’s heaviest cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, stays afloat bc of laws of #physics despite weighing >550M lbs).
#Trump, undeterred by #truth or #science, invoked his intellectual credentials by mentioning his “relationship to MIT.” (Trump’s uncle was a professor at the university, pioneering rotational radiation therapy, which seems a somewhat tenuous connection for conferring shark- or battery-related expertise to his nephew.)
If #Trump had been able to ask his uncle about the risks of being electrocuted by a boat battery because, as Trump put it, “there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water,” perhaps the professor would have informed him that high-capacity batteries would rapidly discharge in seawater & pose minuscule risk to humans because the water conducts electricity far better than human bodies do.
These #deranged rants are tempting to laugh off. They’re par for the course. #Trump is Trump. But Trump may also soon be the president of the #UnitedStates. Imagine the response if Joe #Biden had made the same #rambling remarks, word for word. Consider this excerpt (pic)
Still, #Trump appears to be benefiting from the sheer superfluity of crazy. At rallies, the former president makes stream-of-consciousness statements that would raise questions about the mental acuity of anyone who said them at, say, the tail end of a night at a neighborhood bar, but that somehow don’t generate the same level of concern within the #press or the #Republican Party when Trump says them in front of a cheering crowd. #FourthEstate#journalism#media#VeryStableGenius#BidenHarris2024
By contrast, when #Biden makes a gaffe—mixing up a name or a date rather than, for example, suggesting that boats sink because they’re heavy—questions arise about his mental fitness to be president. A president who occasionally misspeaks is far less worrying than one who purveys #delusional fantasies & #ConspiracyTheories. Biden may gaffe, but he lives in #reality; Trump often doesn’t.