The former President’s recent bizarre rant about sharks has gone viral on social media, but this is just the latest in a long and weird saga.
These tweets are real. Did you know their backstory?
July 2007: Donald Trump meets with adult film star Stormy Daniels, inviting her to his hotel room. Upon arrival, he was watching Shark Week and made her watch with him for an hour before he made a pass at her. Important digital detective work has revealed that the show in question was very likely “Ocean of Fear: The Worst Shark Attack Ever.”
This show was about the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, notably the subject of Quint’s famous speech in “Jaws.” You can watch a trailer for Ocean of Fear here, and it is available on streaming on Max. Shark Week is, notably, a dumpster fire of lies and nonsense about sharks.
Meanwhile: Donald Trump and Stormy Daniels have an affair, during which time she later reports that he regularly talks about how much he hates sharks and is obsessed with them. She also reports him saying that he hopes all sharks die.
August 2012: Concerned environmental activists note that one of Donald Trump’s Atlantic City hotels, “Trump Taj Mahal,” serves shark fin soup in their Dynasty restaurant. They start a petition on Change.Org, which gathers over 1,000 signatures and lots of social media attention. The Trump Taj Mahal Dynasty restaurant does not respond to requests to remove shark fin soup from the menu. See also: my rant on how Change.Org petitions often do not help.
July 2013: It is in response to this Change.org petition and an associated months-long social media campaign that the Extremely Online Donald Trump tweets about how sharks are last on his list, other than the losers and haters of the world.
January 2015: Donald Trump is approached by Ian Ziering, who he knew from “Celebrity Apprentice,” to play the President of the United States in “SharkNado 3: Oh Hell No.” It falls through, and the role of President is instead offered to Mark Cuban. Donald Trump is instead offered the chance to play the Vice President to Mark Cuban’s President, becomes furious, and turns it down. Soon after, he announces his plans to run for President for real. (I am not saying that a casting dispute over a SyFy Channel Movie played a major role in US politics, but I am not not saying that). Ann Coulter instead plays the Vice President. (See also: my review of the surprising cultural legacy of the SharkNado franchise)
Mark Cuban as President in SharkNado 3: Oh Hell No
February 2015: During a Celebrity Apprentice “fan chat,” I asked “Many of the charities featured on Celebrity Apprentice focus on human health and medicine. What’s your favorite environmental charity and why?” Hours later, Donald Trump blocks me on Twitter. I was blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter during his entire presidency, and I remain blocked by Donald Trump on Twitter.
October 2016: The Trump Taj Mahal hotel closes. It is at this point still serving shark fin soup in the Dynasty restaurant. Reporting notes how unusual it is for a casino to lose money, stressing significant mismanagement including not paying vendors.
Also October 2016: Donald Trump pays Stormy Daniels $130,000 in “hush money” to not talk about their affair, which would later lead to him being found guilty of 34 felonies.
February 2017: now-President Donald Trump is served shark fin soup at a state dinner in Vietnam, resulting in some hand-wringing from the environmental community.
July 2017: The Washington Post reports that airspace surrounding Mar-A-Lago is frequently closed, causing a significant disruption to decades-long shark research operations.
January 2018: The Stormy Daniels story, (including discussions of how Donald Trump talked about how much he hates sharks, like, a lot) breaks. This leads to a spike in donations to shark conservation charities in Donald Trump’s name. It also leads to a lot of media coverage about Donald Trump being weirdly obsessed with sharks, and what it says about him as a person and a leader. Despite several interviews, no one ends up actually quoting me as saying “I do not especially care what a disastrous President was watching on television while he was having an extramarital affair, but if anyone wants to learn anything about sharks, Shark Week is not a good choice for fact-based programming.” This remains the second most upset I’ve ever been about not being quoted, after that time when I released a statement about Deep Blue, supposedly the largest great white shark ever seen, stating “In my professional opinion that is a large shark.”
August 2020: At a campaign event, Donald Trump goes off script to say “I said, ‘Wait a minute, wait.’ They actually want to remove all the seals in order to save the shark. I said, ‘Wait a minute. Don’t you have it the other way around?’ That’s true.” No one knows what he was talking about. This rant does, however, inadvertently back up some of the allegations made by Stormy Daniels and contributes to the investigation against him for hush money payments.
January, 2021: The State of New Jersey bans the sale of shark fin soup. Had the Trump Taj Mahal not gone bankrupt due to Donald Trump’s poor management, it would have become illegal to sell shark fin soup in the Dynasty restaurant.
May 2024: Donald Trump is found guilty of 34 felonies stemming from hush money payments to Stormy Daniels.
June 2024: At a campaign event, Donald Trump goes off script and makes a bizarre rant about sharks and boat batteries. This results in some of the most negative press coverage of the campaign, despite the campaign focusing on a variety of extremely awful proposed policies and despite 34 felony convictions. Most coverage is just sorta “WTF” in tone, though Tom Nichols notes “Trump is obviously unfit—and something is profoundly wrong with a political environment in which he can now say almost anything, no matter how weird, and his comments will get a couple of days of coverage and then a shrug, as if to say: Another day, another Trump rant about sharks.”
Also June 2024: Donald Trump tells the same story about sharks and boat batteries, this time complaining that people were unfair to him the last time he told it.
Also also June 2024: At another campaign event, Donald Trump ranted about how he likes lakes because there are no sharks in them. Fact check: actually lots of species of sharks can enter freshwater.
I am writing this before the debate, and as of this writing I do not know if Joe Biden will take Andy Borowitz’s suggestion to wear a shark costume to the debate. I will update this important timeline as needed.