At some point, you may have experienced a moment of doubt. A moment that goes something like “This Trump guy, sure he looks, and acts, and sounds like a racist buffoon who thinks a Windsor knot is man’s highest achievement, but … what if that’s all a trick?” It’s not a trick. And here’s a handy place where you can go when that moment of What if Him Has Brain occurs: Asbestos.
Donald Trump is an asbestos denier.
That’s not to say that Trump doesn’t believe that asbestos exists. He does. It’s that he doesn’t believe it causes cancer. The World Health Organization may believe that asbestos is still knocking off over 100,000 people a year, and the CDC may believe that includes about 15,000 Americans each year from a combination of mesothelioma and asbestos-induced lung cancer, and the definitive proof of asbestos’ connection to these diseases may have been established in 1964 …
But Trump claims asbestos is “100 percent safe.” And he’s so fond of it that he tweeted “If we didn't remove incredibly powerful fire retardant asbestos & replace it with junk that doesn’t work, the World Trade Center would never have burned down.” And Trump has a theory about why asbestos got “a bad rap.”
Trump: I believe that the movement against asbestos was led by the mob, because it was often mob-related companies that would do the asbestos removal. Great pressure was put on politicians, and as usual, the politicians relented.
So, if it seems strange to you that the EPA just made it easier to use asbestos after decades of restrictions, despite it being completely banned by 60 countries. Or it seems unusual that a Russian company has actually put Donald Trump’s face on its asbestos-based products. Yes, really. It’s because Donald Trump believes asbestos is an absolutely safe product that could have saved the World Trade Center and which was removed from buildings because of a mob scheme. Compared to Trump, believers in a Flat Earth are a bastion of insight and careful reasoning.
When that moment of doubt creeps over you … No. He really is exactly that stupid.
