Donald Trump has serious issues with China, excuse me, Chy-nuh. He must have choked on a fortune cookie as an infant, or maybe he had nightmares of being chased by old school Republicans riding dragons. We could have told him that that was only Newt Gingrich and his pets. (Yes, Newt keeps other reptiles for pets — or maybe they’re his relatives — imperial lizards to be precise.)
Rolling Stone is running a wonderful piece describing Trump’s obsession with something that became known in the nomenclature of the White House as the “hurricane gun.” Seriously. Trump thought China had a big mofo of a hurricane gun and was aiming it at the U.S. and causing the conga line of hurricanes that has been plauging us for some time now due to climate change.
Maybe he got the idea from Matt Drudge, who claimed that Obama was directing a hurricane to reduce Mar-a-Lago to gilded flotsam and jetsam. What a shame we missed that one.
“I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us,” said the other former senior official. Trump “wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’ I kept it together until I got back to my office… I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that… He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.” […]
Trump’s “hurricane gun” inquiries add to a list of odd beliefs the former president holds not just about climate science in general — which he has called a hoax “created by and for the Chinese” — but hurricanes in particular. During the 2019 hurricane season, Trump insisted on telling the public that Hurricane Dorian was headed towards Alabama, which no models had predicted. Trump later appeared with a map that appeared to have been edited to include a projection of the storm hitting Alabama. The incident, dubbed Sharpiegate for Trump’s erroneous marking of a map, led to an inspector general’s report which concluded that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration had falsely backed up Trump’s claim about the hurricane’s path as a result of White House pressure.
At times, Trump’s comments about possible Wile E Coyote-style weapons have touched on similarly bizarre ideas mulled by the U.S. during the Cold War.
During the 2019 hurricane season, Trump reportedly kept suggesting to aides that the U.S. bomb hurricanes with nuclear weapons in the mistaken belief that the explosions would somehow mitigate or destroy the tropical storms — an idea first floated by eccentric Cold War scientists working on Project Plowshare, which tried to brainstorm peaceful uses for nuclear weapons.
The U.S. Air Force’s Project Popeye aimed to use cloud seeding — dropping salts and dry ice into clouds in order to induce rain and snowfall — to try and defeat the insurgency in South Vietnam.
“The idea behind it was that we could we slow down weapons and materials getting from North to South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh trail by creating a monsoon season year round so that trail would be unpassable,” explains Vince Houghton, a historian whose book, Nuking the Moon, chronicles some of the more bizarre failed weapons of the Cold War.
Nuke the moon, nuke the hurricanes, you know what I think we should do? Let’s nuke the whales.
And again I say, 74 million people voted for four more years of this derangement and GOPers were lauding this imbecile just last night at the NRCC dinner. This is the best that the Republican party has to offer.
Never mind the facts that hurricanes don’t come from that direction. But we know the former guy is woefully ignorant of everything except his bank balance.