SharpEin Volk, SharpEin Reich, SharpEin Führer!
A hurricane is currently making its way along the coast of North Carolina. It has already devastated the Bahamas, and deaths are expected to be “staggering”.
What President Trump has been focused on, since the hurricane was on it’s way towards the States, was how right he is. He tweeted incorrectly that Dorian was going to hit Alabama. When national agencies corrected Trump, he then displayed a map that was noticeably altered with a Sharpie marker.
It was then revealed that Trump was the one who altered the map.
Surely, the leader of the free world has gotten whatever he is trying to prove out of his system. He must be moving on to a plan of aid for those affected by Hurricane Dorian.
Nope.
Trump’s Presidential campaign is now selling Sharpies with his signature on the side. In gold.
Wait. What?
Trump is notorious for refusing to admit he was wrong. With the Alabama incident alone, Trump has displayed a path projection that he used a Sharpie to project the path he said it would take. He also tweeted out a photo that has lines for potential paths drawn in multiple colors.
It was fake.
Issues of authenticity also did not prevent Trump from tweeting out a doctored video of CNN saying Dorian would hit Alabama.
He has taken, what most might feel is a moment of severe shame, and is now capitalizing off of the gaff. Or, what he now acknowledges is a gaff.
A really long, drawn out, painful-to-see-multiple-days-in-a-row-in-the-news gaff.
When Bernie Sanders ran for President in 2016, he had an incident at a campaign event where a small bird landed on his podium as he spoke. After that, his campaign ran with images of a bird on his merchandise. “Birdie” Sanders has become a meme, of sorts, within the campaign and its supporters.
Tim Ryan, a Presidential hopeful from the Democratic Party, tried unsuccessfully to do something similar. During a televised debate, Ryan was defending his position on greenhouse gas emissions and told Sanders “You don’t have to yell.”
Ryan had “You Don’t Have To Yell” stickers for sale on his website following the incident. Not everyone felt as excited as Ryan may have been about the stickers.
We have success with a meme coming from a political campaign moment with Sanders. An awkward, and ultimately disliked, meme from Tim Ryan. Then we have Trump…
What It All Means
The bigger picture is that Trump, and his administration, are terrible with disasters. Looking at the aftermath of Dorian in the Bahamas, over 70,000 people are now homeless. And the number of deaths is expected to rise significantly with the limited resources they have.
Trump is facing another Puerto Rico, and his response to that event will leave a lot to be desired, and worried about, by Dorian’s victims. Like the Bahamas, Puerto Rico had limited resources. What Trump’s administration contributed for recovery efforts was minuscule in relation to what was needed, and elected officials mismanaged the money.
Yet Trump relented, and Puerto Rico is suffering still.
Perhaps the damage, including the Category Five hurricanes Trump has no memory of happening thrice before since taking office, is ignored intentionally. The President seems to have a vested interest in ignoring climate issues.
Trump recently avoided a G-7 session on climate change. He has, since the start of his campaign, advocated for an absurd notion of “clean coal”. Humanity is also living during the hottest summer in recorded human history, weather abnormalities, like the more frequent and intense hurricanes, are becoming common place, and the rate of species going extinct is speeding up.
Trump’s take? From a press conference in June:
So we have the best numbers that we’ve ever had recently…I’m not looking to put our companies out of business…I’m not looking to create a standard that is so high that we’re going to lose 20–25 percent of our production. I’m not willing to do that…I’m not willing to sacrifice the tremendous power of what we’ve built up over a long period of time, and what I’ve enhanced and revived.
At least when the end of the world comes, we can leave our final thoughts scrawled in Sharpie instead of our own blood.
