There were many things that Donald Trump is creatively bad at doing. Running a social media service is one. Recommending treatments for highly transmissible viruses is another. But there was one subject that inspired some of his most surreal behavior: hurricanes. In 2019, he appeared to have used a Sharpie to doctor a map of a hurricane’s path after he got it wrong. (He didn’t even get the color of pen right.) He also repeatedly floated the idea of stopping hurricanes by nuking them.
Now this. Former Trump officials told Rolling Stone, under anonymity, that he kept badgering people about a mysterious weapon that can only be dubbed a “hurricane gun.” As per RS:
“Near the beginning of Donald Trump’s time in office, the then-president had a pressing question for his national-security aides and administration officials: Does China have the secret technology — a weapon, even — to create large, man-made hurricanes and then launch them at the United States? And if so, would this constitute an act of war by a foreign power, and could the U.S. retaliate militarily? Then-President Trump repeatedly asked about this, according to two former senior administration officials and a third person briefed on the matter.”
It’s like something out of a movie, only not even the silliest blockbuster would dare feature a gun that can shoot weather at enemies. (Although maybe he got it from the Mega Man 2 baddie Air Man, who fires little whirlwinds at players.)
But one former official had a more blunt way of describing Trump’s claim. “It was almost too stupid for words,” they told RS. “I did not get the sense he was joking at all.”
And yet Trump spent the first year of his single-term presidency reportedly kept bugging flabbergasted officials and other staffers about this fantastical, ridiculous weapon. He would bring it up, former staffers say, until 2018, when he appeared to move on to other ideas, like nuking hurricanes.
As of this writing, Trump is still the presumptive frontrunner of the Republican party in 2024.
(Via Rolling Stone)