Trump Thought China Controlled The Weather With A Hurricane Space Laser. Because Of Course He Did.
Does China have a space laser that it's firing at the US to cause hurricanes? Many people are saying China controls the weather and we should bomb the shit out of them if they don't stop fucking with the weather in God's own US of A.
And by "many people," we mean the former president and no one else.
Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley recently decamped from the Daily Beast to Rolling Stone, but they're still supplying us with all the good dirt on wingnut crazytimes. Hashtag blessed!
Today's offering is a batshit story about "your favorite" weather-obsessed president. The same guy who wondered why we couldn't just nuke a hurricane and drew dicks on a map to prove that Hurricane Dorian was actually going to hit Alabama. Apparently that weirdo thought about weaponized weather so much that it was known around the White House as the "Hurricane Gun" thing.
“I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us,” a former senior official told RS. "[Trump] wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’ I kept it together until I got back to my office… I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that… He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.”
“It was almost too stupid for words,” another source told RS. “I did not get the sense he was joking at all.”
The China hurricane gun queries continued until 2018, with the former president wondering if this aggression would necessitate military reprisal. Not that it stopped him conducting international relations on the lanai at Mar-a-Lago, charming the pants off Xi Jinping with "the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you've ever seen." Well, at least until it all went to shit in a trade war that was good and easy to win.
In other Trump news, TPM got its hands on a copy of Mark Esper's upcoming book, in which he reports that Trump wanted to recall retired military officers to active duty so that he could court martial them for the crime of shit-talking the commander-in-chief. Specifically, he wanted former Gen. Stanley McChrystal and former Navy Admiral William H. McRaven re-activated to answer for being "disloyal" to their country, as embodied in the figure of one Donald J. Trump.
“The next thing I knew, Mark Milley and I were sitting in front of the president trying to talk him out of recalling McChrystal to active duty,” Esper wrote about a meeting with Commander Spray Tan in May of 2020.
Esper says that he and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, were only able to talk Trump down after Milley agreed to call the generals personally and "ask them to dial it back.”
"There was no call I remember — and I would have remembered that," Gen. McChrystal told TPM.
And once again the Republic was saved because everyone around Trump said "yes" and then ignored his rantings. Which makes them goddamn heroes, right?
Haha, FUCK YOU. These military stalwarts knew what a lunatic he was, they knew that he was ratf*cking democracy and was likely to blow up NATO if given another term, and they still stood behind him and lent their gravitas to a nutjob who thought China controlled the weather as he ran for a second term. No points — and no money — will be awarded for spilling the tea two years later when it doesn't matter any more.
Do not buy it, and, for the love of God, do not buy this asshole's book.
OPEN THREAD.
[Rolling Stone / TPM]
Follow Liz Dye on Twitter!
Click the widget to keep your Wonkette ad-free and feisty. And if you're ordering from Amazon, use this link, because reasons.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore with her wonderful husband and a houseful of teenagers. When she isn't being mad about a thing on the internet, she's hiding in plain sight in the carpool line. She's the one wearing yoga pants glaring at her phone.
