During rant on Fox News, Trump doubles down on climate lies

More than 1 million Floridians were without power Friday morning after deadly Hurricane Helene ravaged parts of the state Donald Trump happens to call home.

Fortunately for him, the former president hadn’t been in Florida on Thursday as the storm bore down. Instead, he gave a speech from the dry lobby of his Manhattan high-rise, where he doubled down on ignorant claims about climate change.

“You notice that they don’t ever mention anything about environment anymore? What happened to the environment? They don’t mention it,” he said in a rambling rant, targeting liberals. “They don’t mention that the ocean’s going to rise a quarter of an inch over the next 500 years.”

The real issue of import is “nuclear warming,” he added.

This was Trump repeating a false claim that sea level rise is a negligible impact of climate change. (And as he did so, Fox News had a hurricane tracker on the screen next to him, essentially serving as an instant reality check.)

As I explained when he made similarly ignorant remarks in June, sea level rise is actually occurring at an exponentially higher rate than Trump says, and it poses an existential threat to the state of Florida. The state’s home insurance crisis is just one example of how climate change is affecting Floridians’ livelihoods already.

The GOP presidential nominee could not have picked a worse time to push this nonsense. Some Democrats are optimistic about their prospects in Florida this election cycle, in part because they believe that Trump’s racist attacks on Haitian Americans will hurt the Republican ticket in the state, where there is a large Haitian population.

I personally don’t think spinning lies about climate change — in the face of a devastating hurricane for the Southeast — is particularly helpful to his electoral hopes.