Donald Trump, who famously called climate change a “Chinese hoax,” has now embraced a supposed benefit of rising oceans that defies both topography and common sense: that higher sea levels will somehow create more oceanfront property.
“Which gives you a little bit more waterfront property if you’re lucky enough to own it,” he said about sea level rise at a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, back in June.
“You’ll have more oceanfront property, right?” he said during his online conversation with billionaire Elon Musk on Aug. 12 when the topic came up.
And at his rally on Saturday in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, Trump again dismissed climate change and its associated sea level increase, saying that it “will give you slightly more beachfront property if it happens.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost queries about where he might have gotten the notion that rising oceans will somehow create more oceanfront land rather than less.
“I would have told him that doesn’t make any sense,” said one informal adviser who spoke on condition of anonymity, adding that Trump had not sought out his opinion on the matter. “He just says crazy shit.”
Why he would insist on repeating such a plainly absurd assertion is unclear.
The big island of Hawaii, for example, rises more than 13,000 feet above sea level and has 266 miles of coastline. If, hypothetically, the ocean were to rise 5,000 feet, the island would have dramatically less shoreline, not more.
Closer to Trump’s heart, his Mar-a-Lago country club in Palm Beach, Florida, has elevations ranging from sea level to just over 20 feet between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and Lake Worth Lagoon to the west, according to topographic maps of the area. A sea level increase of 10 feet would wipe out more than half of Trump’s waterfront land, while an increase of 25 feet would leave him with no land at all.
“He is a scientific and geographic ignoramus,” said Rick Wilson, whose Lincoln Project group frequently portrays Trump as ill-informed and foolish in targeted advertising in an attempt to get under his skin.
The coup-attempting criminal former president has long claimed that he has superior intelligence, often pointing out that an uncle of his taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and suggesting that brilliance must have come his way through family genes.
During his presidency, Trump described himself as a “very stable genius.” While visiting the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in the early months of the COVID pandemic in 2020, he told staff and reporters, “I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability.”
And after taking a screening test for dementia, Trump bragged later that year that he could recite the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” in that order, which gave him “extra points,” and claimed that feat had stunned his doctors.
The boasts continue to this day. On Monday, he said in an interview with CBS, “I think I am a very bright person. A lot of people say that.”
Despite this, Trump frequently pushed nonsensical theories while he was president. He reportedly wanted to know why hurricanes could not be hit with nuclear weapons as they were forming, and during the COVID pandemic, he suggested injecting disinfectant as a way to kill the virus.
While Trump began calling climate change and global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by China a dozen years ago, his explanation of rising sea levels appears to have begun just a few years ago.
“We’ll have a little bit more beachfront property,” he said at a July 2022 rally in Alaska. “That’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“I think at this point people have just given up,” the informal Trump adviser said in regard to why Trump’s campaign staff has not tried to correct him. “People are numbed by him.”