Trump's Fantasy Land

 

It's not only past Grandpa Cankles' bedtime, it's past 25th Amendment time:

President Donald Trump asked Americans on Thursday if they remembered a massive television outage two years ago.

That outage didn't happen. As he has before, the president who is fond of telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking people to recall something he had made up.

This time, Trump's fictional story was about wind energy. He has for years railed against it, tried to thwart it and made false claims about it – including a phony anecdote about how, in places where wind power is used, people can't turn on their TVs when the wind isn't blowing.

That isn't true; wind is used as part of a mix of electricity sources, not as the only source, so the grid keeps running and TVs stay on even when there is no breeze. (Also, there are batteries that can store energy from wind turbines for deployment during low-wind periods.) But Trump has often delivered the no-TV story with a comedic touch that has allowed it to skirt fact checks.

In his Thursday remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, he told it mostly as if it were a real reminiscence.

He denounced "the Green New Scam, where we were scammed." Then he said: "The whole country was – I wasn't scammed. I got it right from the beginning; I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. You know? They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn't watch your television. They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn't blowing. Remember that? 'Darling, we'd like to watch the debate tonight.' 'I'm sorry, the wind isn't blowing.'"

Uh, no.

Tens of millions of Americans watched his June 2024 debate with then-President Joe Biden – more than 51 million on television alone, according to Nielsen estimates. The viewers, of course, included people in the state that produced by far the most wind-powered electricity in 2024 and still produces by far the most today…Republican-dominated Texas, which is also the most populous state Trump won...

The world's most powerful nation has an increasingly demented, somnolent, dirt-dumb octogenarian wanting to control more and more of our lives, enabled by a fascist movement that threatens to kill our 250-year-old experiment in democracy.  What a bizarre, incredibly stupid  -- and dangerous -- time we're living in.