Fresh off facilitating the coronavirus-related deaths of nearly 200,000 Americans, Donald Trump visited California Monday to reassure voters that his science denialism doesn't start and stop with deadly pandemics.
As Trump adamantly pushed "good, strong forest management" (i.e. raking) as the answer to the Golden State’s current inferno, state officials practically pleaded with him to acknowledge the hand of climate change in some 3 million acres of scorched earth.
"We've had temperatures explode this summer," Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources, said of the state's hottest August on record. "If we ignore that science and put our heads in the sand and think it's all about vegetation management, we're not going to succeed together in protecting Californians," Crowfoot implored.
"It'll start getting cooler, you just watch," Trump responded, cocking a half grin.
"I wish science agreed with you," said Crowfoot.
Trump flashed an amused smile, like he was talking to a two-year-old, and offered, "Well, I don't think the science knows actually."
Too bad Trump went to the trouble of thinking of something original. He could have just offered something along the lines of, "One day the earth will just go away, like a miracle"—similar to his pandemic claims.
A week ago Trump visited Florida and, in a cheap political ploy to curry favor in the state, declared himself “a great environmentalist” for extending a ban on oil drilling in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.
But once a science denier always a science denier. Trump wasn't even concerned about the immediate death and destruction he brought to America by deliberately underplaying the severity of the coronavirus, there's no way he'll ever give a lick about frying the planet and all its inhabitants at some future date he won't be around to see.
Joe Biden had the right term for Trump, a “climate arsonist.”
“If we have four more years of Trump’s climate denial, how many suburbs will be burned in wildfires? How many suburbs will have been flooded out? How many suburbs will have been blown away in superstorms?” Biden said in a speech Monday. "If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if more of America is ablaze?"
Watch the science denier in chief here: