Donald Trump, who famously called climate change a “Chinese hoax,” has now embraced a supposed benefit of rising sea levels that defies both topography and common sense: that higher sea levels will somehow lead to more oceanfront property.
“If you’re lucky enough to own one, it gives you a little more waterfront property,” he said of sea level rise at a rally in Chesapeake, Virginia, in June.
“They’re going to have more oceanfront properties, right?” he said during his online conversation with billionaire Elon Musk on August 12 when the topic came up.
And at his rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, Trump again dismissed climate change and the associated rise in sea levels, saying that “there will be a little more beachfront property when it happens.”
Trump’s campaign did not respond to HuffPost’s questions about where he might have gotten the idea that rising sea levels would create more rather than less coastal land.
“I would have told him that doesn’t make any sense,” said an informal adviser who asked not to be identified, adding that Trump had not asked his opinion on the matter. “He’s just talking crazy shit.”
Why he insists on repeating such an obviously absurd claim is unclear.
The large island of Hawaii, for example, is more than 13,000 feet above sea level and has 266 miles of coastline. If the ocean were to hypothetically rise by 5,000 feet, the island would have a significantly shorter coastline, not more.
Trump’s ultimate dream is his Mar-a-Lago Country Club in Palm Beach, Florida. It sits between the Atlantic Ocean to the east and the Lake Worth Lagoon to the west, at an elevation of just over 20 feet, topographic maps of the area show. A 10-foot sea level rise would destroy more than half of Trump’s shoreline, while a 25-foot rise would leave him with no land at all.
“He is a scientific and geographical ignoramus,” said Rick Wilson, whose Lincoln Project group frequently portrays Trump as ill-informed and stupid in targeted advertising in order to provoke him.
The former president, who attempted a coup, has long claimed to be a man of superior intelligence, often pointing out that an uncle of his taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and suggesting that genius must have been in his family’s genes.
During his presidency, Trump described himself as a “very stable genius.” During a visit to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta in the early months of the 2020 COVID pandemic, he told staff and reporters, “I like this stuff. I really understand it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural gift.”
And after undergoing a dementia screening test, Trump later that year boasted that he could say the words “person, woman, man, camera, television” in that order, earning him “extra points,” and claimed the feat had stunned his doctors.
The boasting continues to this day. On Monday, he said in an interview with CBS: “I consider myself a very intelligent person. A lot of people say that.”
Still, Trump has frequently promoted nonsensical theories during his presidency. He reportedly asked why hurricanes couldn’t be attacked with nuclear weapons as they formed, and during the COVID pandemic he suggested killing the virus by injecting it with disinfectant.
While Trump began calling climate change and global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by China twelve years ago, he seems to have only developed his explanation for sea level rise a few years ago.
“We’re going to have a little bit more beachfront property,” he said at a rally in Alaska in July 2022. “It’s not the worst thing in the world.”
“I think people just gave up at this point,” the unofficial Trump adviser said when asked why Trump’s campaign team had not tried to correct him. “People have become desensitized to him.”
