Among the many joys of the Trump Era is the knowledge that if it is cold somewhere, odds are the President of the United States will crow that it's proof climate change is not real. Yes, the world's most powerful man has, over and over again, treated the fact that it's cold outside as evidence that the idea the planet is getting warmer is not the result of decades of work by hundreds of scientists across dozens of countries, but is in fact a hoax cooked up by the Chinese. Like the views of Senator James Inhofe, who once threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate to disprove a global historical phenomenon, this operates on the premise that climate scientists say it will never again be winter.

A dangerous cold front is sweeping the midwest this week, so it was time for another Official Message from the President uniquely calibrated to once again make the whole world dumber.

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In the beautiful Midwest, windchill temperatures are reaching minus 60 degrees, the coldest ever recorded. In coming days, expected to get even colder. People can’t last outside even for minutes. What the hell is going on with Global Waming? Please come back fast, we need you! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2019

This man is allergic to books. He is so deeply incurious about the world you wonder how he's learned to navigate outside Mar-a-Lago or his golden apartment in the sky. He is, quite simply, the Dumbest Man Available, and we made him president. This is another piece of red meat for the reactionary Base, whose only goal is to maintain power with which to piss off liberals. His aides will pass it off as a "joke," despite the fact that this attitude is reflected in his administration's policy. It is particularly fucking infuriating because we learned just this month that the oceans are warming faster than we thought, Antarctica and Greenland's ice sheets are melting faster than we thought, and in general, the climate crisis is likely even worse than climate scientists—who are actually fairly conservative in their public messaging—were previously willing to say outright.

We can explain how climate is not the same as weather. We can run through how 2018 was hotter than any year on record, in terms of global temperatures, except for three: 2015, 2016, and 2017. We could mention how 2018 was the hottest year on record for the planet's oceans, and the previous hottest ever was 2017. The top five hottest years for ocean temperature have occurred since 2014. But what's the point? Like the phony Republican concern about the national debt Trump has opted to completely ignore, he honestly does not care because he'll be dead when the shit hits the fan. It's just reactionary bullshit, and Stephen Colbert put paid to it years ago better than anyone.

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Global warming isn't real because I was cold today! Also great news: World hunger is over because I just ate. — Stephen Colbert (@StephenAtHome) November 19, 2014

Someday, we'll just have to tell our kids we didn't do a damn thing—and, in fact, sent a guy named Wells Griffith to an international climate conference to advocate for burning more coal—because we elected The Big Dumb President, and that's just the way it goes.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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