The devilish details that make no sense

Opinion

Perhaps we’ve just become inured.

We all knew that kid when we were in school. You know the one — he would tell you he could throw a rock further than anyone in school, he just couldn’t do it today, because he’d hurt his arm winning an arm-wrestling championship against the biggest weightlifter the world had ever seen. The kid who told you his father was a secret agent who could kill anyone he wanted to, any time.

Eventually, you didn’t question it any more. It was just the same bafflegab day after day, easier to ignore than to challenge.

“You hold the world record in both rock-skipping and high-jumping? Whatever…”

Who knew that kid would ever become the president of the United States?

Here’s just a sampling of the oddities not reported — how could it all be? — from Donald Trump’s speech to the United Nations this week.

Trump: “We want to have a cessation of the development of nuclear weapons. We know and I know and I get to view it all the time, ‘Sir, would you like to see?’ And I look at weapons that are so powerful that we just can’t ever use them. If we ever use them, the world literally might come to an end. There would be no United Nations to be talking about. There would be no nothing.”

What, exactly, would be the point of paying to build weapons so powerful they couldn’t be used, because all that would be left was “no nothing”?

Trump, on stopping refugees fleeing repressive regimes: “That journey was loaded up with death. Loaded up with death. Dead bodies all along. All along the roads of jungles to get up. They go through jungles, they go through areas so hot, you couldn’t breathe. They were dying of suffocation, areas so hot, that you couldn’t breathe. Dead bodies all over. By them not coming, we’re saving tremendous numbers of lives.”

OK.

Trump on blowing things up: “Please be warned that we will blow you out of existence. That’s what we’re doing. We have no choice. Can’t let it happen. I believe we lost 300,000 people last year to drugs. Three-hundred thousand. Fentanyl and other drugs. Each boat that we sink carries drugs that would kill more than 25,000 Americans. We will not let that happen.”

Meanwhile: the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated 80,391 drug overdose deaths in the United States in 2024, a decrease of 26.9 per cent from 110,037 deaths in 2023, the lowest number of projected deaths since 2019. Trump’s math would also mean, by blowing up three “drug boats,” 75,000 of those 80,000 overdose deaths would already have been prevented.

Trump: “Those big windmills are so pathetic and so bad, so expensive to operate, and they have to be rebuilt all the time and they start to rust and rot. Most expensive energy ever conceived. … And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. … So why is it that they build them and they send them all over the world, but they barely use them? You know what? They use coal, they use gas, they use almost anything, but they don’t like wind, but they sure as hell like selling the windmills.”

China announced a plan this week to increase its use of renewables like wind and solar to six times what it had in place in 2010, meaning 30 per cent of its power would come from renewables.

Trump: “But we have a border, strong, and we have a shape, and that shape doesn’t just go straight up. That shape is amorphous when it comes to the atmosphere.”

What?

It all just flows over you, a river of ridiculous. And a dangerous one.