Trump: I am going to end the mandate on electric one day
Trump, Truckers, A Boat Company, Electric Shock in Water, and Sharks.
As a lawyer, I believe in verbatim transcripts for accuracy.
Who among us has not heard, even treasured the humor of Trump’s rhapsody on the theme of ending “the mandate on electric one day,” and the Southern-style yarn about Trump’s supposed encounter with a boatman with 50-years experience, where “he said, ‘Nobody ever asked this question, and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT,’ very smart.”
First, my venture for the full transcript was awakened by a funny, wonderful post by Jay Kuo here:
Jay Kuo links Trump’s yarn on this hilarious parody, with a cartooned Trump in Orange Jumpsuit here:
https://x.com/mimagawatch/status/1800877877858373825?s=61&t=dlYuBcwzZXmET9Xd_RRdaQ
But it is hilarious to watch Trump onstage, with MAGA-enthusiasts behind, cheering him on in Nevada, as he wanders on and on.
So, Jay Kuo induced me (unknowingly on his part) to source the matter exactly.
So, in that I love C-Span, here is their broadcast of the full speech in Nevada:
https://www.c-span.org/video/?536150-1/president-trump-holds-rally-las-vegas
The Southern yarn I track on the video from about minute 42:05 through minute 44:44.
Now, a full, typewritten transcript, beginning to end of Trump’s Las Vegas speech appears here:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-rally-in-nevada
In this transcript are the gems.
For example, scroll to minute 48:54 and you will find where Trump refers to the extreme heat of Summer in Las Vegas as he speaks to his devotees:
(48:54) * * * And by the way, isn’t that breeze nice? Do you feel the breeze? Because I don’t want anybody going on me, we need every voter. I don’t care about you. I just want your vote, I don’t care. You see, now the press will take that and they’ll say, “He said a horrible thing.” They’ll say, “He said…”
Now, that is a precious quote from the Trump we all know and whom we loved as a TV Personality on The Apprentice as he fired people or as he opened new golf courses, which of course would be the most glamorous ever.
But the really precious stuff is what Jay Kuo highlighted for us, that appears in greater length and detail here:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-rally-in-nevada
(42:27)
So we have a country that’s in trouble. We’re going to end the mandate on electric one day. They want to make all boats too. I went to a boat company in South Carolina, the boat. I said, “How is it?” He said, “It’s a problem, sir. They want us to make all electric boats.” These are boats that are from 16 to 35 or so feet, fishing boats, leisure boats, beautiful company in South Carolina, beautiful.(42:49)
The guy’s been doing it for 50 years. He sells hundreds of boats every couple of months. I mean, really fantastic guy. And they use the Mercury engines and different engines in the back, no problem. They want to take that out. They want to make it all electric. He said, “The problem is the boat is so heavy it can’t float.”(43:07)
I said, “That sounds like a problem.”(43:09)
He said, “Also, it can’t go fast because of the weight. And they want to now have a fifty-mile or a seventy-mile radius. You have to go out 70 miles before you can really start the boat up and you go out at two knots.” That’s essentially almost like two miles an hour.(43:22)
Say, “How long does it take you to get out there?”(43:25)
“Many hours, and then you’re allowed to go around for 10 minutes, but you have to come back because the batteries only last for a very short period of time.”(43:33)
So I said, “Let me ask you a question.”(43:35)
And he said, “Nobody ever asked this question, and it must be because of MIT, my relationship to MIT,” very smart.(43:43)
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 underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?”(43:58)
By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark… I watched some guys justifying it today. “Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.” These people are crazy.(44:14)
He said, “There’s no problem with sharks. They just didn’t really understand a young woman swimming now who really got decimated and other people too,” a lot of shark attacks.(44:22)
So I said, “So there’s a shark 10 yards away from the boat, 10 yards or here. Do I get electrocuted if the boat is sinking, and water goes over the battery, the boat is sinking. Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?” Because I will tell you he didn’t know the answer.(44:42)
He said, “Nobody’s ever asked me that question.”(44:45)
I said, “I think it’s a good question. I think there’s a lot of electric current coming through that water.” But you know what I’d do if there was a shark or you get electrocuted, I’ll take electrocution every single time. I’m not getting near the shark.(44:58)
So we going to end that. We’re going to end it for boats. We’re going to end it for trucks. The trucks, on a tank of diesel fuel a truck goes from New York, a big, beautiful Peterbilt or any one of these great companies, they go from New York to Los Angeles without a stop. With electric much of the truck is used, the capacity for batteries, the batteries are very heavy and very big, very, very big. Many times the size of a tank that carries lots of gallons of diesel. You have to stop six times and you have to get charges.(45:32)
There are no charges. The whole thing is… It’s the kind of thing that if your five-year-old grandson were sitting up here and you gave him a quiz, he would say, “Don’t bother with the electric.”(45:41)
There’s another thing, the truck is so heavy because batteries are very heavy. The truck weighs more than twice as much as a diesel truck. So what happens is they have to fix every bridge all over the United States to handle the weight. Every bridge has to be rebuilt because the weight is double and triple that of a gasoline or diesel tank truck.(46:07)
And you say to yourself, “Who are these people that are destroying our country? Why are they destroying our country? Why is it that they’re destroying our country?” All of that stuff is going to end. We’re not going to have men playing in women’s sports.
Again, for the full transcript, there is so much usable, here:
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-rally-in-nevada
There is so much more.
Now, let us take a pause.
We have a right to laugh, to take joy, to make fun, to slap our sides.
Having said that, let me turn the narrative to the dark side.
A very important voice on this human, imperfect, but friendly medium called Substack is CellyBlue, who is a real inspiration to me.
CellyBlue had two posts today that inspire me and speak to dangers from the Trump-Fundamentalist Cult (my words, not hers):
I’ll point out the second one after a word on the one about Miferpriserone. (This is an important and essential health service and pill, but I cannot pronounce nor spell it without help.)
In the above post, CellyBlue goes into great analytic detail about a deadly part of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.
The Heritage Foundation describes its nearly 1000 pages (at 1000 pages, I will only read a work of the classic value of War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov (yes, I have easily read both of those, with ALL OTHER WORKS of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, thank you)) but NOT some SCREED of right-wing racists.
Here is how the Heritage Foundation describes its 1000 page (well, 992 pages, OK?!) MOUSE-terpiece:
This new vigor of the right can be found at Project 2025. Organized by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 has brought together 45 (and counting) right-of-center organizations that are ready to get into the business of restoring this country through the combination of the right policies and well-trained people. The Project’s foundation is built on four interconnected pillars.
New vigor of the right . . .
I could go all day without hearing that!
OK.
For the persistent, here is where you can read the WHOLE MOUSE-terpiece:
https://www.project2025.org/policy/
That links to here (pdf, 992 pages):
https://static.project2025.org/2025_MandateForLeadership_FULL.pdf
CellyBlue does a tremendous job of breaking down the worst, misogynistic policies that would underlie a Red-Administration. As CellyBlue points out, birth control elimination would come next.
Like Roe for abortion, our rights to privacy under the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution for couples, in their homes, to use birth control in intimate relations, without the heedful eye of the state, is grounded in a Supreme Court Decision.
When, in 1971, I was a freshman at the University of Arizona Law School (in lovely Tucson, where, that Summer, I met my lifelong girlfriend, heartthrob, the light and inspiration of my life, Nancy), I was fortunate that our law professor for Constitutional Law was the Distinguished Visiting Professor from the University of Michigan, Paul Käuper (pronounced KOY-per), who was an eminent expert on First Amendment law. His lectures were miraculous: It was like listening to Judge Learned Hand or Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes or Justice Felix Frankfurter, Mr. Käuper was such an eminent jurist and judicial philosopher.
During that Spring course in Constitutional law, I learned, to my amazement, that just a few years earlier, Connecticut had forbidden birth control products to married couples.
A married couple challenged the statute, and the Supreme Court decided on Fourteenth Amendment privacy grounds that married couples had a right to privacy from the prying eyes of the state, with the consequence that the state could not forbid them to buy or use birth control.
This was the leading case of Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) with Mr. Justice William O. Douglas writing the decision.
This is the critical part.
Justice Douglas did not read this right of privacy directly from the Fourteenth Amendment or the Constitution.
Instead, Justice Douglas determined that to meaningfully implement the intent of the drafters of the Fourteenth Amendment, one had to generously read the rights protected:
381 U. S. at p. 484
The foregoing cases suggest that specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.
. . .
[The] First Amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. In like context, we have protected forms of "association" that are not political in the customary sense, but pertain to the social, legal, and economic benefit of the members. NAACP v. Button, 371 U. S. 415, 371 U. S. 430-431. In Schware v. Board of Bar Examiners, 353 U. S. 232, we held it not permissible to bar a lawyer from practice because he had once been a member of the Communist Party.
. . .
381 U.S. at p. 482-483
The right of freedom of speech and press includes not only the right to utter or to print, but the right to distribute, the right to receive, the right to read (Martin v. Struthers, 319 U. S. 141, 319 U. S. 143) and freedom of inquiry, freedom of thought, and freedom to teach (see Wiemann v. Updegraff, 344 U. S. 183, 344 U. S. 195) -- indeed, the freedom of the entire university community. Sweezy v. New Hampshire, 354 U. S. 234, 354 U. S. 249-250, 354 U. S. 261-263; Barenblatt v. United States, 360 U. S. 109, 360 U. S. 112; Baggett v. Bullitt, 377 U. S. 360, 377 U. S. 369. Without those peripheral rights, the specific rights would be less secure. And so we reaffirm the principle of the Pierce and the Meyer cases.
See: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/381/479/
These “peripheral rights” were the logic for Justice Douglas to expand into the penumbra (shadows!) of rights of the Fourteenth Amendment, without which the explicit rights would be gutted and “less secure.”
Justices Harlan and Black, in separate opinions, objected against the use of vague, nonjuridical language like shadowy penumbra to uphold rights that, in the view of these justices, should be inferred directly from the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Why discuss Griswold?!
Does anyone doubt the point raised by CellyBlue, above, that the GOP, specifically in Project 2025, where the “vigor of the new right” is taking us?!
The “vigor of the new right,” hailed by the Heritage Foundation, is taking us from the Catholic and Southern Baptist absolutism on abortion (no exception for violated 10-year-old girls or the death of the mother), to IVF (the seeded egg from the ovary is, after all, a new, complete person once intruded by sperm), to . . . birth control.
As long as Griswold prevails, they could not deprive couples of birth control.
But if Harlan and Black questioned the “penumbra,” Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito question it on steroids, as emboldened by the recent overturning of Roe v. Wade by the very bold Dobbs Decision:
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/19-1392_6j37.pdf
And as CellyBlue points out, Project 2025 has a very detailed plan to accomplish at least the first step: the elimination of Miferpriserone.
Please read CellyBlue’s column.
In fact, read all of her columns.
I am going to soon close, adducing to another, critically important observation of CellyBlue here:
This is where my loathing of the radical right enflames, against “the new vigor of the right” that Heritage boasts of. Racism. Any talk of “poisoning our blood.”
Let me close with CellyBlue’s quote of the very great James Baldwin, “We can disagree and still love each other, unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”
CellyBlue styles her Column: CellyBlue — I do know this! YES SHE DOES, and I for one join her spirit.
Thank you for the great references, Armand. Did you see this one? It's my fave.🤣
https://youtu.be/x6wCaWzjicM?si=76iN7C-9HGkmU1tr
He chose electrocution and I’m Sticking to it.