... Hours before meeting with his probation officer about his recent felony convictions, a leading candidate for U.S. president went on a bizarre rant about sharks.
Sharks, Donald Trump claimed, were attacking more frequently than usual (not true) and posed a newfound risk because boats were being required to use batteries (not true), which would cause them to sink because they were too heavy (really, really not true -- the world's heaviest cruise ship, the Icon of the Seas, managed to stay afloat because of the laws of physics despite weighing more than 550 million pounds).
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 and pose minuscule risk to humans because the water conducts electricity far better than human bodies do.
Sharks appear to have troubled Trump's mind for years. On July 4, 2013, Trump twice tweeted about them, saying, "Sorry folks, I'm just not a fan of sharks -- and don't worry, they will be around long after we are gone." Two minutes later, he followed that nugget of wisdom with: "Sharks are last on my list -- other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!"
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 United States. Imagine the response if Joe Biden had made the same rambling remarks, word for word. Consider this excerpt:
"I say, What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you're in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery's underwater, and there's a shark that's approximately 10 yards over there?' By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that?
A lot of shark ... I watched some guys justifying it today: Well, they weren't really that angry. They bit off the young lady's leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.' These people are crazy."
Coming from Biden, that exact statement might have prompted calls from across the political spectrum for him to drop out of the race. From Trump, it was a blip that barely registered. ...
[emphasis mine]