"You're obviously not listening to what Trump is actually saying. You're being brainwashed by the mainstream fake media. Show me something where Trump says he's anti EVs."
Umm... are you? This article takes his own words on the matter...
“So we have a country that's in trouble,” Donald Trumpbegan.
A lot of Trump’s stories begin similarly, so those in the audience at his Las Vegas rally this weekend would be forgiven for not predicting the multiple tangents the former president was about to take. Even when his next sentence narrowed it down — “We’re going to end the mandate on electric one day” — no one could have guessed what the next 2½ minutes would bring.
Sharks. MIT. Electrocution. And, of course, a guy who called Trump “sir.”
It is possible that the sheer weirdness of this story has already led to your seeing it. Transcripts of Trump's 500-plus-word riff spread over social media, as people tried to parse it like the final exam of a fifth-grade English class. If you didn't see it, allow me to offer an abridged version.
The story began with Trump describing a conversation with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina. (This was the person who purportedly referred to him as “sir.”) Trump offered more familiarity with boats than his audience — again, in the desert city of Las Vegas — might have possessed, with casual references to vessel lengths and motor manufacturers. The point, though, was that even this estimable industry had been afflicted by calls to reduce fossil fuel consumption.
According to Trump’s telling, the manufacturer was being asked to make only electric boats but that such boats 1) were too heavy to float, 2) had to be slowly driven out to sea, which took hours and 3) then had so little charge left that you could only be out for 10 minutes. The first point is obviously false, given that there are lots of floating electric vessels — including in the U.S. Navy — so there’s no reason to assume that the rest would be true, either.
Then came Trump's question.
“So I said, ‘Let me ask you a question,’” Trump explained. “And he said, ‘Nobody ever asks this question,’ and it must because of MIT, my relationship to MIT. Very smart.”
Trump’s relationship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is that he had an uncle who taught there. And as everyone knows, you can tell a lot about a person’s capabilities from what their parents’ siblings do for a living. But back to the question.
“I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat, and you have this tremendously powerful battery, and the battery’s now underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’” Trump said.
Then Trump went on a tangent about sharks and shark attacks. In the abstract, this was just odd, given that — just as a reminder! — this was Trump trying to convince a lot of Nevadans to vote for him for president. But his aversion to sharks is well-established — and, in fact, overlaps with his recent criminal conviction in Manhattan.
The criminal trial in New York centered on Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress who claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 — he denies they had sex — and the hush money payment made to her by Trump’s attorney before the 2016 election. In a 2011 interview with In Touch Weekly that was published after the details of the alleged encounter between Trump and Daniels were made public in 2018, she recounted his disdain for sharks. Daniels explained that one of their encounters overlapped with the Discovery Channel’s “Shark Week” programming. As the two sat in Trump’s hotel room, he volunteered how much he hated sharks and wished they all would die. That his central concern related to a sinking boat would be sharks certainly bolsters the idea that Daniels was telling the truth.
In this case, that concern was offered as a counterpoint to the threat from the sinking vessel.
“Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking?” Trump says he asked the man. “Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”
The boat manufacturer, he said, didn't know the answer. But lots of other people do: The risk of electrocution is extremely low, so stay on the boat.
There are lots of ways to think about this. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that people who actually make electric boats (unlike this possibly apocryphal guy from South Carolina) understand that electricity and water don’t mix that well and, as such, build their vessels to minimize that risk.
When Trump offered a similar question of shocks vs. sharks a few months ago, the site Heatmap spoke with boat manufacturers who “said they meet a waterproofing standard that is either at, or just below, what is required for a submarine.” Arc Boat Company has an explanation about using electricity in a boat on its website, noting that its “battery packs are completely watertight.”
“We use leak detection sensors inside of the packs — something you don’t typically see in electric cars — so that in the unlikely event that water is present, we’ll know about it immediately and can issue an appropriate warning,” the site explains. Often, companies selling products to the general public consider the risk that their products might kill people before bringing those products to market.
It is also not the case that an electrical charge in the water spreads everywhere at the same strength indefinitely. When lightning strikes the ocean, it is not the case that every fish dies or that every person swimming on every coast is fried. The fish survive in part because the charge is primarily at the surface, so the analogy here isn't perfect. But being at a distance from the charge matters regardless of the source of the charge.
I emailed the Batten College of Engineering and Technology at Old Dominion University to get the input of experts on the question of the deadly boat battery. Students from the college study electric propulsion and placed third in an electric boat competition last summer.
(20min delay)