Donald Trump has very particular obsessions. They are, to the outside observer, often incomprehensible, such as his continued insistence that the catapults on aircraft carriers ought to be steam-based, not electric. He was at it again today in Japan:
"You know, they were saying — one of the folks said, 'No, the electric works faster. But, sir, we can only get the plane there every couple of minutes,'" Trump said aboard the USS Wasp, according to a White House transcript, adding: "So, really, what they did was wrong."
"I think I’m going to put an order," the president continued. "When we build a new aircraft carrier, we’re going to use steam. I’m going to just put out an order: We’re going to use steam. We don’t need — we don’t need that extra speed."
There is probably a book to be written on how it is real estate failson and second-tier television celebrity Trump convinced himself of a hidden expertise on aircraft carrier catapults, an expertise that he is now going to inflict on everyone around him because his stagnating brain can only remember a few dozen things and an aggressive opinion on catapults turned out to be, by random luck, one of them. Perhaps there is old Apprentice footage of him and Omarosa discussing, at length, the technical aspects of carrier launch systems.
His Memorial Day-themed visit to the USS Wasp featured another odd moment: Navy crewmen sporting "Make Aircrew Great Again" morale patches on their sleeves, patches that featured a rather awkward depiction of either Donald Trump or, possibly, actor William H. Macy. Mitt Romney in a wig? Stephen Colbert's long-lost Norwegian half brother? It is ... not clear. (The patches have existed since at least 2017, however.)
The wearing of a depiction of a particular president along with a variation of his clearly partisan campaign slogan might possibly be against military rules, if anybody anywhere is still keeping track of these things, but it more likely skirts those regulations because, c'mon, that's not actually a picture of Trump to begin with. And you can't honestly say it is meant to be flattering to Trump, rather than mocking him.
The short version: Everything Trump touches turns weird, wrong, and vaguely creepy. Right now he's probably sketching out new catapult designs that rely on horseshoe crab blood to function, for no particular reason other than he wants to.
