Trump Wants To Give Every American Their Own Otisburg
Trump Wants To Give Every American Their Own Otisburg
A fool's view of climate change
Donald Trump and Elon Musk were a couple of white dudes sitting around talking on a glitchy livestream Monday. Musk verbally manspread over Trump, who slurred his words like he’d just lost a game of “hide the dentures.” However, one exchange stood out to me: Musk, perhaps suffering from a mild case of the “woke mind virus,” tried to sell Trump on the benefits of clean energy.
“My view is, like, we do, over time, want to move to a sustainable energy economy, because eventually you do run out of, I mean, you run out of oil and gas,” Musk said. “It’s not infinite and there is some risk.”
However, Trump insisted on remaining the dumbest person in this online space. He countered that “the biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean is going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years, and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right?”
Here’s the clip that the KamalaHQ account quickly posted on social media:
Trump’s callous “oceanfront property” remark recalls Lex Luthor’s mad scheme in 1978’s Superman movie. Luthor (Gene Hackman) targets the San Andreas Fault with hijacked nuclear missiles. The resulting massive earthquakes would cause the westernmost part of California to fall into the ocean. The comic book Luthor of the period would’ve just threatened California with destruction and demanded slightly more than a million dollars. Hackman’s Luthor is seemingly obsessed with “real estate,” a tedious trait that Kevin Spacey’s version would share in Superman Returns With The Same Plot. He’s acquired worthless desert land in California and assumes he’ll make a fortune once that all becomes “oceanfront property.” This plan isn’t simply psychotic — millions of people would die horribly — it’s completely idiotic. This is not how real estate works. California’s oceanfront property is valuable because it’s been developed and doesn’t border a mass grave site. Luthor’s plan would devastate the economies of both California and the United States, which is a great outcome if you’re Osama bin Laden but not so much if you want to personally profit from the destruction. His property would remain an uninhabited disaster zone for decades, and the government would likely seize the land for public use (resettlement of survivors, etc). California’s eminent domain laws require “just compensation” for the property, but “just” would probably mean whatever Luthor originally paid, not his imagined “new Malibu/Costa del Lex” property values. Like Trump, Lex is also a known criminal with an obvious if stupid motive for attacking California. He’d end up in jail even if Superman wasn’t the star of the movie.
Trump, the very model of a modern supervillain
When comics artist John Byrne revamped Superman in 1986, he updated the hero’s arch-nemesis Lex Luthor from mad scientist to corporate raider: “Of course, Donald Trump was our model,” Byrne told The Daily Beast in 2016. (Writer Marv Wolfman originally pitched the Trump-style billionaire concept.) This was no longer a Lex who took the day off to celebrate Albert Einstein’s birthday. Although there were elements of Wall Street’s Gordon Gekko and his “greed is good” ethos present in Byrne’s Luthor, he lacked Michael Douglas’s charisma. Byrne’s Luthor was also physically larger and more overtly sleazy than past versions, as if he’d peeked into Trump’s future. Plus, his massive ego and obsessive need to slap his name on his buildings and products screamed Trump.
In his first appearance, Byrne’s Luthor mentions his “oil fields in Venezuela.” Trump told Musk that he might flee to Venezuela if he loses the election, which should technically result in having his bail revoked.
Jon Cryer’s Lex Luthor on the Supergirl TV show turned the sun red so he could kill Superman, but he realized the damage he was inflicting. He just didn’t care. Trump’s approach to climate change is more mindless than diabolical. According to the folks at NASA, who have functioning brain stems, the current global average sea level rise as of 2023 was 0.17 inches per year — not one-eighth of an inch over 400 years. That’s more than double the rate in 1993, when I was blissfully listening to U2’s Zooropa. The National Ocean Service projects that sea level along the U.S. coastline will rise, on average, 10 to 12 inches between 2020 to 2050. That’s equal to the rise measured between 1920 to 2020.
President Joe Biden declared at the first (and his last) presidential debate that “the only existential threat to humanity is climate change,” which Trump immediately mocked the next day at a Virginia rally.
“He said it again last night, that global warming is an existential threat. And I say that the thing that’s an existential threat is not global warming, where the ocean will rise — maybe, it may go down, also — but it may rise one-eighth of an inch in the next 497 years, they say. One-eighth, which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough though.”
CNN added that this “appeared to be a joke,” because the mainstream media constantly minimize his madness. Uptight journalists will protest when Democrats make couch jokes, but they shrug when Trump makes light of climate change’s devastating impact, which is like a politician “joking” that 9/11 made it easier to find an apartment in lower Manhattan.
All versions of Lex Luthor — except for maybe Jesse Eisenberg’s — understand how oceans work. As Philip Bump at the Washington Post explained, “If you have a defined area of land that’s surrounded by water, an increase in the height of the water means that it covers more land. The result is less land touching the ocean, not more.”
Flooding has increased in the more expensive, oceanfront parts of South Carolina and Florida. Ocean temperatures in Florida are steadily rising, and hurricanes have become more destructive. Oceanfront property will mean very little if the water scalds swimmers and cooks sea life.
What CNN dismissed as some light extinction-level event humor is the same callow shortsightedness that Ben Shapiro demonstrated when he claimed that if rising ocean levels flooded coastal communities, the residents could just sell their homes and move — the free market in action! — but as YouTuber H. Bomberguy famously asked, “Sell their houses to who, Ben? Fucking Aquaman?”
The threat that named himself
Donald Trump told Elon Musk, “The one thing that I don’t understand is that people talk about global warming or they talk about climate change, but they never talk about nuclear warming.”
No one talks about “nuclear warming” because it’s something he just made up. He’s rambled nonsensically about this in other interviews. He told CNN in June, “The only global warming that matters to me is nuclear global warming. Because that’s the real deal.”
Last year, during an interview with Tucker Carlson, Trump said, “Nobody talks about nuclear ...the biggest problem we have in the whole world. It’s not global warming, it’s nuclear warming.” He also raved about the new “oceanfront property.”
He’s probably talking about “nuclear war,” because he later said, “All it takes is one madman ... and it’s only a matter of seconds. You don’t have to wait 200 to 300 years for it to happen.”
Trump often suggests that Biden (and now Kamala Harris) will blunder us into a nuclear armageddon because they’ll stupidly provoke Russia if the U.S. doesn’t abandon Ukraine to Vladimir Putin. Global diplomacy and global warming are different things, and when they did intersect with the Paris Agreement, Trump sabotaged the result.
“I call it the n-word,” he said about nuclear war. “You have two n-words. You don't mention either one of them.” Oh, I’m sure he’s recently mentioned the actual n-word in reference to Harris.
However, Trump’s right that all it takes is “one madman” to destroy the world. The twist is that Trump is that madman, and that’s no joke.
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<Deep breath> Man, day like today you can hardly even smell the rotting corpses and toxic waste. Oh look honey! The ocean is burning purple again!
Trump also told the audience at his recent Nazi rally in North Carolina that he doesn’t know what ‘net zero emissions’ means, claiming that nobody knows. Also, if the water rises, Ben Shapiro’s wife could wade around in it and might finally have a WAP to show him.