Another day, another opportunity for President Donald Trump to say something dumb about which he knows nothing. But what’s notable about this time is that while addressing supporters in Old Forge, Pennsylvania on Thursday, Trump took a shot at sharks, an animal that Jezebel considers a friend. And you know what they say: You mess with the shark, you get the jaws and the fin and the skin that feels like sandpaper and the blog post from an ardent shark champion.
“They were saying the other night, the shark. They were saying, ‘Sharks, we have to protect them.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait,’” said Trump. “They actually want to remove all the seals in order to save the shark. I said, ‘Wait, don’t you have it the other way around?’ It’s true, I’m not a big fan of sharks either. I don’t know, how many votes am I going to lose?”
Raise your fin if Trump just lost your vote. Thought so.
As usual and as The Guardian notes, what he’s talking about is anybody’s guess. Shark Week? Seal-culling? Something? In any event, removing seals from the water could actually hurt sharks like great whites, who depend on sea puppies for their food. Obviously!
Shore presence of sharks seems to be on the rise, which in theory increases the chances of shark-related fatalities—a great white killed a woman in Maine in July—but “shark attacks” are still rare and, I argue, a necessary evil for, oh you know, maintaining the food chain’s balance. The water is not our dominion, as is evident by our lack of gills. It is postulated that sharks like great whites don’t actually like the taste of human flesh, Jaws’s teachings be damned, and that bites that lead to death are a product of shark curiosity (they only have their mouths with which to feel things out and those mouths happen to be stacked with row after row of massive, serrated teeth). I doubt they’d have any interest in Trump’s petrified-beef-jerky ass, anyway.
Stormy Daniels, by the way, totally called out Trump’s shark obsession in a 2011 interview.