It’s no surprise that Donald Trump doesn’t understand mundane elements of modern life. He was born rich and spent decades in a gold plated penthouse before becoming the most powerful man in the world.
One might expect a person who’s lived such a cloistered life away from real-world concerns to have the good sense to avoid playing the expert on dishwashers and light bulbs. But Trump has never been associated with good sense.
Over the last 12 months, Trump has held forth on subjects he clearly knows nothing about with the confidence we’ve come to expect from a narcissist who seemingly never holds his tongue. Here’s a 2019 Trump glossary of everyday things, including definitions that are sometimes wrong, sometimes painfully obvious, and always embarrassing.
Airplanes: “Far too complex to fly.”
Dishwashers, old: “Remember the dishwasher? You’d press it, boom! There’d be like an explosion. Five minutes later you open it up, the steam pours out.”
Dishwashers, new: “Now you press it 12 times. Women tell me … You know, they give you four drops of water. And they’re in places with so much water they don’t know what to do with it.”
Energy efficient light bulbs: They “cost a fortune,” are “very dangerous,” and when they break “it’s considered almost like a waste site.” They’re also responsible for how he looks: “The light’s no good. I always look orange.”
Grocery stores: “Local people know who they are, when they go for groceries … They will work along.” By “work along,” trump appeared to mean that groceries will let furloughed federal workers buy groceries on credit.
Incandescent light bulbs: “A bulb that’s better for much less money.”
Sinks, showers, and other elements of bathrooms: “You turn the faucet on in areas where there’s tremendous amounts of water, where it all flows out to sea because you could never handle it all, and you don’t get any water.”
“You wanna wash your hands, you turn on the sink, no water comes out. So you leave the water, go ten times as long, it’s same thing. You have a shower. Drip. It’s no good for me, for me.
Toilets: “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once; they end up using more water.”
Vaping: “It’s not a wonderful thing. It’s got big problems.”
Windmills: “It’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly – very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous – if you’re into this – tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere.