WASHINGTON—Just so happens I crested Capitol Hill in time to see Marine One lift off, carrying the president* away to the first part ofhis journey to visit the Americans in storm-ravaged Puerto Rico. Upon landing, of course, he demonstrated the kind of discreet, yet warm, empathy that has marked his entire time as president*, especially over the last month or so, when he’s had to console the victims of three hurricanes and the bloodiest unfortunate exercise of Second Amendment freedoms in the modern history of the country. From Bloomberg:

“I hate to tell you, Puerto Rico, but you’ve thrown our budget a little out of whack -- because we’ve spent a lot of money on Puerto Rico and that’s fine, we’ve saved a lot of lives… When you look at a real catastrophe like Katrina and you look at the tremendous, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people that died, and you look at what happened here, with really a storm that was just totally overpowering, nobody’s ever seen anything like this,” Trump said. “And what is your death count right now?”

Jesus H. Christ on a dome of high pressure, somebody get the hook.

Too late.

Trump invited military officials seated at the briefing to take turns discussing their role in the response, and after an Air Force representative spoke, the president went on a tangent about the F-35 fighter plane.

“Amazing job. So amazing that we’re ordering hundreds of millions of dollars worth of new airplanes for the Air Force, especially the F-35,” Trump said, asking the representative, “do you like the F-35?”

“It’s a game-changing, technological, awesome airplane,” the unidentified representative said.

“I said, ‘how does it do it in fights and how do they do in fights with the F-35?”’ Trump continued, apparently referring to a previous discussion he’s had about the plane, “He said, ’we do very well, you can’t see it, you literally can’t see it.’ So it’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see, right?”

See, here’s the thing. Biff. The people down there? They don’t have electricity. They don’t have clean drinking water. They’re sweltering to death by the side of the goddamn road. They could care less about the F-35 because you can’t eat it. And, the other thing, Biff, is that the F-35 remains the $4 trillion lemon of the skies. From The National Interest:

Program managers are also hiding key information about the safety of F-35s, as John Donnelly from CQ revealed this week. In October 2015 Donnelly reported the plane’s ejection seats posed “a heightened risk of fatal whiplash during an emergency ejection” to pilots. This risk was increased by a heavy $600,000 helmet, which could pose “a risk of severe neck injury.”

At least it’s not beheading the dummies any more.

And, Biff? You can see it. If it landed on the White House lawn, you would be able to say, “Look. A fighter jet landed on the White House lawn.” Good god.

Still, though, who goes to a disaster area where folks are trying to hold cholera at bay with both hands and brags about his shiny new deathtrap of an airplane? Does he have to come back? Is that, like, a rule or something?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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