Donald Trump is in a dead heat with Hillary Clinton in Nevada, according to a number of polls. But after Wednesday’s appearances in the state, he may not be for long. Not only did he arrogantly lecture Nevadans on how to pronounce the name of the Silver State—getting it exactly wrong—he also showed he has no idea about one of Nevada’s most controversial issues, the storage of nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain.
Like various blowhard hucksters before him, Donald Trump has honed a pair of techniques for dealing with subjects about which he is clueless. First, he aggressively pretends to know what he’s talking about. This can consist of mistakenly asserting that someone else is wrong about something and that he, tremendous genius that he is, understands and nobody else does. Hence the pronunciation screw-up. Or, when he is utterly ignorant of the subject at hand, he deploys random phrases that sort of sound as if they mean something, combined with a promotional blurb for one or another of his enterprises. Plus some throwaway lines. Then he moves on. Hence, the mumbly Yucca Mountain word jumble.
These techniques work when his audience knows no more than he does—which suits him fine because he knows you can fool some of the people all of the time, and that’s enough to loot their wallets. Or get their votes.
In Reno, Trump informed an audience how to pronounce the name of their state. Then it got worse.
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“Heroin overdoses are surging. In fact, overdoses in Nevada — Nev-AAH-duh,” he said at a rally in Reno. “You know what I said? You know what I said? I said when I came out here, I said, ‘Nobody says it the other way, it has to be Nev-AAH-da.’”
The crowd cheered, and Trump offered an anecdote to drive the lesson home. “If you don’t say it correctly — and it didn’t happen to me but it happened to a friend of mine, he was killed,” Trump said.
Uh-huh. Except Nev-AAH-duh is not the way Nevadans pronounce it. One could argue that since it’s a Spanish word—“snow-covered” or “snowy”—Trump’s pronunciation is closer to correct. But that’s not how it works. Otherwise, we Californians would all be calling the state’s fourth largest city SAHN Fraahn-CEES-koh. As Sen. Harry Reid sneered in a statement: "If Donald Trump wants to come down from the penthouse his daddy bought him to lecture us on how to say Nevada, he could at least pronounce it correctly.” And that pronunication is Nev-ADD-ah.
Earlier in the day, in a KSNV-TV interview in Las Vegas, Trump stumbled on a more substantial issue: nuclear waste burial at Yucca Mountain.
The average citizen can’t be expected to know about such matters. But candidates for the presidency, or the consultants who advise them, should. It’s not like the Yucca Mountain controversy is totally obscure. It’s been an issue since 1987. But when asked about it Wednesday, Trump hauled out a typical (for him) response. Here’s the exchange, courtesy of Sopan Deb:
Blah blah blah. Yadda yadda yadda. Now, many politicians might take the approach Trump did here. But afterward they would go to their advisers to demand a briefing so that they wouldn’t be caught flat-footed next time. You can bet, however, that if a reporter in Nevada or somewhere else were to ask The Donnie about Yucca Mountain tomorrow or next week, he still wouldn’t have a clue. Because that’s just how he is. See his response on the nuclear triad, for example.
As for the reporter’s tongue-in-cheek (we hope) question about burying nuclear waste beneath the wall Trump wants to build to keep Mexicans out of the United States, don’t give the man ideas. Next thing you know, he’ll be suggesting the highly radioactive waste not be buried beneath the wall but rather that the wall itself be made of the stuff.
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See also PaulDem’s story on this subject.