Trump Responds to Climate Question by Rambling Incoherently About Golf Course
Latino voters grilled Donald Trump on Wednesday during a town hall hosted by Univision, and if the audience’s expressions were anything to go by, his performance was lackluster.
At one point Carlos Aguilera, a construction worker from Florida who was born in Cuba, asked Trump if the recent slew of natural disasters and environmental issues battering the Sunshine State had made him reconsider his claims that climate change is a “hoax.”
Trump responded by bragging about his golf courses and lying about his environmental record.
“I always feel that with the climate and I have been a great, I have been an environmentalist,” Trump said at one point in his rambling. “I built many things. I own Doral right next door, and we did that in a very environment — I got awards, environmental awards for the way I built it, for the water, the way I use the water, the sand, the mixing of the sand and the water.”
Trump has never produced the names of these alleged awards, and a 2017 investigation by The Washington Post could not find evidence that they exist.
Trump never directly answered Aguilera’s question, but he did claim that under his administration he “had the cleanest water, crystal clean. We had the cleanest water, the cleanest air.” (In fact, the Trump administration rolled back critical protections on American freshwater resources, allowing companies producing harmful pollutants to discharge them into waterways with less oversight.)
“I hear a lot about climate and they talk about global warming — because they used to call it global warming, now they call it climate change because that covers everything — global warming. The real global warming that we have to worry about is nuclear. The water is coming up eighth of an inch over 300 years, the ocean is going to rise and you know — nobody knows if that’s true or not — but they’re worried about the ocean rising an eighth of an inch or a quarter of an inch in three hundred years. What I’m worried about is nuclear weapons tomorrow,” Trump concluded.
Trump’s answer on climate change was emblematic of a pattern throughout the town hall: his total inability to answer simple, pointed questions from voters.
Jesús González, a Chicago voter of Mexican descent, asked Trump point blank if he could explain his gun policy to the parents of school shooting victims.
“We have a Second Amendment and the right to bear arms,” Trump responded. “They need that for security, they need them for entertainment, and for sport, and other things.”
In another tense moment, Trump responded by attacking immigrants as criminals when asked by Jorge Velázquez, a Mexican-born farmer, how he would prevent the cost of produce from rising if he deported large swaths of the agricultural workforce.
The former president first (falsely) claimed that he was “the best thing that happened to farmers,” before pivoting to accusing the Biden administration of releasing “hundreds of thousands of people that are murderers, drug dealers, [and] terrorists.”
Trump also repeated a debunked claim that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris had released more than 13,000 undocumented migrants convicted of murder into the country.
One attendee questioned the former president about his smears against immigrant communities, asking Trump — in Spanish — if he really believed that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets despite repeated denials by city officials.
Trump responded by once again doubling down on the false claim and attacking immigrants who need translation help.
“I was just saying what has been reported,” Trump countered, “and [they’re] eating other things too that they’re not supposed to be.
“As far as Springfield is concerned, you have a city of 52,000 people, and they’ve added almost 30,000 migrants into the city,” Trump added. “You have a town, a beautiful town with no problems. All of a sudden they have 30 or 32,000 people dropped into the town — most of whom don’t speak the language at all. And what they’re doing is they’re looking all over for interpreters. Well, I mean I think you can’t just destroy our country.”
The former president’s performance was clearly unconvincing to much of his Hispanic audience. Ramiro González, a former registered Republican, directly asked Trump why he should vote for him when former members of his own administration — including former Vice President Mike Pence — have publicly disavowed him.
“I want to give you the opportunity to try to win back my vote,” González said.
Trump responded by dismissing the criticism from his former allies, claiming that 97 percent of his former administration still supported him. The former president then moved on to attacking Pence, doubling down on his claims of election fraud, and minimizing Jan. 6 as a “day of love.”
“You had hundreds of thousands of people come to Washington. They didn’t come because of me. They came because of the election,” Trump said. “Some of those people went down to the Capitol peacefully and patriotically. Nothing done wrong at all.
“I hope someday maybe we’ll get your vote. Sounds like maybe I won’t, but that’s OK,” Trump concluded.
A pan over the audience showed several viewers crossing their arms, and practically glaring at the former president. If his appearance on Univision was an attempt to reassure Latino voters that he’s their best choice in November, the atmosphere in the room paints a frosty picture for his prospects.
More from Rolling Stone
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.