On Thursday evening, Donald Trump issued a challenge to one of his political rivals on Twitter.

That wouldn’t be news in and of itself since he does it all the time, but this particular Quixotic endeavor was noteworthy because the windmill at which he is tilting isn’t a human being. Rather, Trump has now literally dared the environment to prove itself capable of producing unseasonably hot weather in the U.S.

See, Trump has to couch everything in terms of Trump. He does that not only with things that have no discernible connection to him, but also with things that couldn’t have any discernible connection to him. For instance, he consistently suggested that the magnitude of the hurricanes we witnessed in 2017 was somehow mother nature’s tribute to the size of his electoral college victory, a suggestion that was made even more ridiculous by the fact that that victory was not as large as he insists it was relative to his predecessors.

Well on Thursday night, he took this up a notch by claiming that because it’s cold during the winter, he made the right decision to abandon every other country on earth in the quest to fight global warming. That would have been absurd enough on its own, but as alluded to above, he also kinda, sorta dared the weather to prove him wrong:

This is the rough equivalent of running up to a sleeping tiger and slapping it across the face, although that’s not entirely accurate because the weather, by virtue of being a phenomenon as opposed to a thing that feels and thinks, cannot of course understand that a challenge has been issued.

As one notable follower on Twitter put it, “this may be the dumbest thing that you have tweeted in 2017. And that is saying something.”

Yes, “that is saying something.” And usually when someone has said something so stupid that it qualifies as the dumbest thing they’ve said in an entire year, it means that predicting it would have been difficult. Well not this time. Because this is what WaPo’s weather team tweeted a day before Trump’s tweet:

“Invariably,” Trump took the bait.

Oh, and see that little map at the bottom of the tweet? Yeah, well here it is blown up:

It is literally hotter than normal everywhere else in the world.

Nothing further.