“I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody.”
Chris Hayes showed this bizarre rant last night. IIt is from a speech Trump gave on Saturday. He noted that everything Trump said about wind turbines (which he calls windmills) was wrong (fact check). Hayes did note that there was actually one thing he did say that was true:
”You know we have a world, right? We have a world, so the world is tiny compared to the universe.”
Here’s the transcript issued by the White House. I wonder how whoever has the menial task of making sure transcripts of his speeches are accurate feel when they actually type out words like these.
I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody I know. It’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly—very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous—if you’re into this—tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You s is from know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint—fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything—right?
So they make these things and then they put them up. And if you own a house within vision of some of these monsters, your house is worth 50 percent of the price. They’re noisy. They kill the birds. You want to see a bird graveyard? You just go. Take a look. A bird graveyard. Go under a windmill someday. You’ll see more birds than you’ve ever seen ever in your life. You know, in California, they were killing the bald eagle. If you shoot a bald eagle, they want to put you in jail for 10 years. A windmill will kill many bald eagles. It’s true.
The following excerpt is from “Trump attacks on wind turbines, low-flow toilets and LED lightbulbs set up key campaign clash with Democrats” in yesterday’s Washington Post.
Trump’s anti-environmentalism message was encapsulated in a weekend speech to a conservative group in South Florida that included a diatribe against wind-powered turbines — arguing that building them produces “a tremendous amount of fumes” and that the “windmills,” as he calls them, are noisy, unattractive and kill too many birds.
“I’ve seen the most beautiful fields, farms, fields — most gorgeous things you’ve ever seen, and then you have these ugly things going up,” he said of the wind turbines. “And you know what they don’t tell you about windmills? After 10 years, they look like hell.”
The broad nostalgia encapsulated in Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan has become increasingly specific as he has zeroed in on consumer issues such as energy-efficient appliances, carbon-reducing fuel standards and plastic straw bans. Often operating from his own feelings rather than scientific evidence, the president has castigated Democrats’ environmental agenda as unworkable and counterproductive.
How to you know that all of this ranting is bullcrap?
He ends his maniacal anti-wind turbine harangue with:
I’m not the first to make this observation, many others have. Jimmy Kimmel had a monologue about this which even included a windmill comment.
Donald Trump celebrated Melania's birthday in a very romantic way, and according to the Washington Post, he has now made more than ten thousand false or misleading public statements since taking office. The best part of when he lies is that he always follows the lie with the words 'it's true.'
It is truly mind boggling that Republicans with above average intelligence can see Trump in moments like this and think he is smart enough to handle the responsibilities of the country. I can see how those who cheer him on at his rallies think he has, as he puts it, the biggest brain and believe it when he assures them he knows more about windmills than anybody. He speaks to them in their language which is not the language of the written word.
He speaks in sentence fragments and in a way that keeps them interested and entertained. He instinctively reads the crowd.
His rally goers will wait in line and stand around until he starts his performance and although some give up (maybe with weak bladders) and leave, it appears most will stay through a two hour speech. These tend to be people who don’t read so they don’t expect a highly literate discourse.
How is it that members of Congress and those in his White House who are not at all like rally attendees don’t see that this president is simply not smart enough to be president?”
Consider: ‘Idiot,’ ‘Dope,’ ‘Moron’: How Trump’s aides have insulted the boss” from Politico a year ago. These are from the article:
- Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said Trump had the understanding of “a fifth- or sixth-grader,
- White House chief of staff John Kelly called Trump “an idiot”
- Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, former chief of staff Reince Priebus called Trump an “idiot,
- former economic adviser Gary Cohn said Trump was “dumb as shit,”
- Former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said in November 2017 that Trump was “like an 11-year-old child,”
- Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson in July 2017 called Trump a “moron,”
- Former National Security Advisor HR McMaster mocked Trump, also calling him an “idiot. McMaster also said Trump was a “dope” with the intelligence of a “kindergartner.”
A friend of mine who is a retired clinical psychologist who is an expert on intelligence testing surprised me some months ago when I asked for an estimate of Trump’s tested IQ. The response then was that charitably it would be 100, smack tab in the middle of average.
Here’s what the psychologist had to say today:
I had to do some thinking about this interesting question and review the different IQ categories. I came up with borderline IQ and possibly even lower than that. I based this on his lack of ability to follow questions and respond in a logical manner with well-thought out replies. Also on his lack of ability to handle any type of complex thinking - instead he reverts to slang or name-calling or labeling, none of which demonstrate any real understanding of the original concept of the speaker’s comment.
His inability to handle complex thinking is revealing of his lack of understanding concepts that have any real level of depth. He has several phrases that he uses often to label people, and these are very disturbing in that they are the language that a second grader or first grader might use, such as “that person is mean” or “that person is bad.” You can easily hear this in his labels of people who are trying to immigrate or people who have criticized him, where he labels all of them as “bad”.
It is a real question as to his IQ, which we know is quite low, but there is a more disturbing question about the cause of his recent and severe decline in mental abilities, probably indicative of a very rapidly progressing dementia.
UPDATE: A researcher from the University of California at Davis came up with IQ scores using biographical information about the presidents' openness, "intellectual brilliance" and leadership. Presidents Obama and Trump aren’t included. According to the estimates Trump, if his IQ is 100, would rank much lower than the last place Ulysses S Grant at 120.
Related: Future generations will look back on Trump’s latest wind turbines rant in awe and horror, VOX
Those comments betray an ignorance of how batteries work and of the idea that wind is just one part of a broader renewable energy system. But his audiences don’t seem to mind — in fact, quite the opposite. For instance, after Trump wrapped up his Turning Point wind energy rant by saying, “why is it okay for these windmills to destroy the bird population?” someone in the audience yelled out, “Because they’re idiots!”
“No, but it’s true,” Trump replied, despite the fact that just about everything he just said was not true. “Am I right?”
Update:
This is a quote from what scholar and linguist John McWhorter said on Brian Williams last night: Language expert: Trump is a truly inferior person to be leading a nation
And then, just the meanness. If you talk to an actor, they’ll tell you as fascinating as it is to watch somebody be angry in a play, angry is easy. If somebody doesn’t know how to act, it’s fairly easy to have a tantrum. What’s difficult is getting on stage and conveying things such as genuine happiness or remorse or ambiguity, and notice how those three things are utterly alien from anything we’ve seen of Trump. What you see is a certain joy in making fun of other people. This is a truly inferior person to be leading this nation, and the bit with Dingell, he ought to be utterly ashamed of himself. And yet as we know, life will go on, and that thing could possibly be reelected because that’s how life works. We’ve unleashed something that’s truly frightening.