Donald Trump, Whales, Wind...

...And Me

One of the reasons I keep the English newspaper the Guardian as my home page is for the headlines. This one is classic:

Trump falsely claims wind turbines lead to whale deaths by making them ‘batty’

The story begins:

“Donald Trump has launched a lengthy and largely baseless attack on wind turbines for causing large numbers of whales to die, claiming that “windmills” are making the cetaceans “crazy” and “a little batty”.

Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, used a rally in South Carolina to assert that while there was only a small chance of killing a whale by hitting it with a boat, “their windmills are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before. No one does anything about that.”

About a decade ago, (thanks to a reader of this Substack,) I worked on a rapid response program debunking myths about wind energy and was given a handbook rebutting every false claim made about wind turbines’ impact on wildlife. It covered bats, birds, eagles, condors—but no whales.

I’ve said it before in this space, and it’s worth remembering: Donald Trump believes that a lie is just something that isn’t true yet. He doesn’t see the difference between what is and what he thinks ought to be. And unlike everyone else on the planet, his words don’t begin as thoughts in his brain—he pulls them out of somewhere else. He doesn’t think about what they mean because he literally doesn’t think.

He may not really believe that wind turbines are killing whales, but he knows it sounds good. What he really cares about is staying in the spotlight. As Maggie Haberman says, he saw the presidency as “the ultimate vehicle to fame.”

Now, he sees it as a literal get out of jail free card. Except it won’t be.

First of all, as former House Speaker Paul Ryan just said,

“Do you think those suburban voters like Donald Trump more since Jan. 6?” Ryan said. “I mean, good grief. They didn’t vote for him this last time, they’re not going to vote for him again.”

Joe Scarborough likes to recite a similar line, saying that the suburbs of Atlanta, Philadelphia and Detroit are not going to vote for Trump this time either, honing in on the most salient fact in this argument.

The presidential election will be determined not in 50 states, but in four, according to Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball:

The four Toss-ups are Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — the three closest states in 2020 — along with Nevada, which has voted Democratic in each of the last four presidential elections but by closer margins each time (it is one of the few states where Joe Biden did worse than Hillary Clinton, albeit by less than a tenth of a percentage point).

Add to this the fact that Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, which Joe Biden won in 2020, are now even more Democratic—Pennsylvania just instituted automatic voter registration, which Donald Trump said was “unconstitutional”—and you can’t see another path to victory for Donald Trump.

That Crystal Ball analysis concludes with this:

We have previously noted that only seven states were decided by less than three points in 2020: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. This represents the real battlefield: Particularly if the race is a Biden vs. Trump redux, we would be surprised if any other state flipped from 2020 outside of this group.

At some point, Donald Trump will have to accept what you’ve been hearing nonstop on cable news—that even getting elected President won’t make all his legal problems go away.

And he’s not going to get elected President anyway. (See above).

In my last post—it’s been awhile—I took you Inside Trump’s “Brain”:

Chris Christie is right. I’m terrified of going to jail.

And I don’t really want to be President, either. I just don’t want to be a loser!

So I’ll stay in the race as long as I can, and when they come to me and beg me for the good of the country to accept a deal that keeps me out of jail if I don’t run for President, I’ll say yes.

I’ll say I had my fingers crossed when they got to the word “guilty.”

I stand by this prediction.

Trump will keep on calling for Generals to be executed, TV networks be banned for treason, Constitutions be terminated and other “thoughts” delivered by alimentary canal, but that makes him a freak of nature—not a President.