Not going to lie, friends: we hate having to address a Trump tweet. They’re always so dumb, so misleading, and such a distraction from the actual atrocities his administration is committing. (Not to mention the general skeeviness of scrolling through the responses to his tweet, and drowning in a river of obvious bots, losers with anime avatars, and #resistance grifters.)
But the layers of irony and idiocy of Monday’s tweet falsely claiming the US has the cleanest air in the world warrants unpacking.
First off, the US doesn’t have the cleanest air in the world. The World Health Organization report the graphic came from said as much--we rank #11. The question, then, is who added the lie, the big bold headline, to the image before Trump tweeted it out?
But wait, there’s more! The country-level scale of the graphic glosses over all the local areas in the US that are much worse than others. By averaging the good places with the bad, it obscures how polluted some areas actually are.
And then there’s the fact that the data is from 2016, meaning Trump is bragging about the state of air pollution under President Obama.
And the cherry on top, the coup de grace, the real stinker, is that this was about particulate matter pollution: PM2.5. You know, the pollutant that Trump’s administration is pretending doesn’t exist to justify its rolling back of regulations--even as it touts the PM2.5 reductions of its own policies and as its own scientists detail the massive public health threat it poses.
In one little tweet, Trump managed to misrepresent the source material, misrepresent the actual state of air pollution, wrongly take credit for Obama’s regulations, and praise reductions of pollution that his own government is claiming doesn’t need to be reduced.
Really, it’s an impressive amount of misinformation to fit into nine words and a map. Say what you will about Trump, but when it comes to making the most out of Twitter, he’s impressively energy efficient.
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