It's a great day to remember this perfectly insane Trump quote on hairspray and the environment
Numerous media outlets are reporting today that President Trump plans to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change. It's hardly shocking news, of course. It's like walking by a D.C. dumpster and spotting Steve Bannon supine on a hastily cobbled nest of medical waste and Fresca bottles, limbs akimbo, furiously licking delicious melty nubs of Swiss cheese from a freshly discarded Hardee's wrapper. Disturbing, yes. Alarming, certainly. But surprising? What universe have you been living in the past four months?
So it's important to remember on a day like this that just because Donald Trump is president, that doesn't make him any less insane. It just makes him a bigger problem than the guy whistling the Small Wonder theme in the Dunkin' Donuts restroom all day. Sure, even the teenaged Peter Parker understood that "with great power comes great responsibility" — but he was bitten by a spider, not a radioactive Kanye West. Turns out that crazy trumps civic responsibility every damn time.
So to those of you who held out hope that Trump might be coached up on climate science enough to see reason — well, recall this perfectly insane quote from the campaign trail:
"You know you’re not allowed to use hairspray anymore because it affects the ozone, you know that, right? I said, you mean to tell me, 'cause you know hairspray’s not like it used to be, it used to be real good. … Today you put the hairspray on, it’s good for 12 minutes, right. … So if I take hairspray and I spray it in my apartment, which is all sealed, you’re telling me that affects the ozone layer? I say no way folks. No way. No way. That’s like a lot of the rules and regulations you people have in the mines, right, it’s the same kind of stuff."
Believe it or not, Trump is wrong about this.
So give Trump a little credit: He took an issue that was of paramount concern to himself and Vidal Sassoon and used it to leverage the justified angst and rage of tens of thousands of Appalachian coal miners. There's a certain political deftness — even genius — to this, but that doesn't make Trump any less crazy either.
To be clear, Trump's real message was that he cares more about his poofy hair than your skin. The worldwide ban on CFCs prevented countless skin cancers, but hey, Trump's lousy hairspray only lasts for 12 minutes now.
This is how our president thinks. That's why we've basically just said, "Screw you, Earth. Better luck with your next highly evolved species. Hopefully, they don't have hair."
By the way, the ban on CFCs was a huge success. The vast majority of the world acted in concert to avert an environmental disaster.
Gee, go figure.
