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While analysts debate whether his opponent is pivoting to the center after being elevated to the position of Democratic nominee, Donald Trump is showing no signs of doing so.
Instead, he’s falling back on an old favorite: wild tales supposed to illustrate the folly of liberalism around the issue of climate change and environmentalism. The ex-president did so in two interviews this week, one with a conservative podcaster and another as he delivered a rally-esque diatribe to a one-man audience of Dr Phil on Tuesday.
First came was his explanation for why temperatures are warming and the Earth’s climate is now observably headed in one direction: nuclear weapons.
“The problem isn’t the fact that the oceans, in 500 years, are going to raise a quarter of an inch. The problem is nuclear weapons, it’s nuclear warming,” the ex-president told podcaster Shawn Ryan on Monday. “The level of power of the nuclear weapon today...You take a look, go back many many decades, and look at Hiroshima, Nagasaki — that was so many years ago. And now you look at today, and multiply that by what took place there by 300 or 400 times. And that's the problem.”
Nuclear weapons are not used in conflict today; many nations still possess them, but largely as a deterrent. Even US officials in the Biden administration, who have frequently been on the hawkish side of warnings about Russia’s military aggression in Ukraine and elsewhere, say that the Kremlin’s threats of the potential use of such weaponry to be just bluster.
Most nuclear testing ended decades ago. The exception is in North Korea, which continues to develop a nuclear weapons program and most recently tested the detonation of a nuclear device in 2017, doing so in an underground facility like the rogue state’s previous tests. The extent to which such tests have contributed to rising global temperatures in recent decades is negligible.
But Trump wasn’t done with such theories. A day later, he was on Dr Phil and like many of the doc’s old cable show guests began tilting at windmills — albeit in a more literal fashion that the “Cash Me Outside” girl.
“Wind is fine, but it, it kills the bird, [the] birds,” Trump told a silent Dr Phil, putting a disdainful emphasis on the word “fine” as he discussed the supposed slaughter of avians by wind power turbines. “It’s the most expensive energy in the world, and the environmentalists love it. Why do they love it? It kills all the birds. Walk to the bottom of a windmill and take a look, it looks like a bird cemetery.”
His latest rant against wind power is yet another example of him spreading age-old misinformation; wind turbines account for around one in four thousand bird deaths worldwide, a fraction of the rate birds are killed by a much more common source — buildings, according to MIT.
“Donald Trump is unraveling in real-time every day. Trump is so scared of the excitement and momentum of Kamala Harris’s campaign that he’s ranting about climate denial conspiracy theories, raving about wind energy, and shouting about birds at anyone within earshot. Trump is spinning faster than the wind turbines he’s spent years ranting about,” said Pete Jones, a spokesman for the group Climate Power.
Neither argument by Trump is really anything new, but it is a sign of his continued inability to remain on-message, especially at a time when it would be quite politically advantageous for him to pivot to the center and reach out to independents.
The Trump campaign has attempted to guide the ex-president towards lines of attack aimed at the Biden-Harris administration’s foreign policy record this week as the US recognized the third anniversary of a deadly terror attack committed against US troops during the chaotic pullout from Afghanistan, an event that marred Biden’s first year in office. Yet the president’s own failure to stay on message has diluted the effectiveness of those attacks — as has a developing story about the conduct of Trump’s campaign staffers on Monday at a memorial service held at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
If Trump is unable to make that pivot — a necessary journey for most candidates as they enter the general election period — it could pose additional problems for the ex-president as he seeks to blunt Harris’s continued, persistent momentum.
