The president could have used a question about plastic waste to inflame the culture wars – but his answer wasn’t far off the mark

There was no shortage of pressing issues for Donald Trump to address on Friday afternoon when he spoke briefly to the press as he made his way to board a helicopter that would carry him to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Reporters posed questions about:

Iran’s seizure of British oil tankers

Trump’s racist and xenophobic smears of representative Ilhan Omar and three other Democratic congresswomen

the first amendment

American exceptionalism

Jeffrey Epstein

allegations that Trump was involved in directing his personal attorney Michael Cohen to make illegal hush payments to Stormy Daniels

trade talks with China

the potential involvement of Senator Rand Paul in talks with Iran

the definition of racism

Robert Mueller’s upcoming testimony to Congress

sanctions against Zimbabwe

But it was the question from a reporter who piped up after Trump had stonewalled a question on his felonious former fixer that was the last, well …

“Are you in favor of banning plastic straws?” the reporter asked.

“I do think we have bigger problems than plastic straws,” Trump responded. “You know, it’s interesting about plastic straws: so, you have a little straw, but what about the plates, the wrappers, and everything else that are much bigger and they’re made of the same material? So, the straws are interesting. Everybody focuses on the straws. There’s a lot of other things to focus on. But it’s an – it’s an interesting question.”

Trump’s response is largely remarkable for how reasonable it is. Straws are an interesting question that have garnered disproportionate focus, and other single-use plastics, such as cups, plates and wrappers, do need to be part of efforts to address our unsustainable addiction to plastic.

As the Guardian has reported in our special project United States of Plastic, the average plastic bag is used for just 12 minutes and can take 450 years to break down. Plastic straws only make up about 1% of the plastic waste in the ocean, according to Jim Leape, co-director of the Stanford Center for Ocean Solutions.

And while plastic straw bans alone will solve neither climate change nor plastic pollution, they have also been criticized by advocates for the rights of people with disabilities, who often need straws to drink. Kim Sauder, a PhD student in disability studies, has described such bans as “environmental theater”. (The recent accidental death of a British woman who was impaled by a metal straw during a fall has also drawn attention to the potential risks of metal reusable straws.)

Trump’s response is also surprising because, for once, he eschewed fanning the fire of a culture war that his campaign has been attempting to stoke. Plastic straw selfies were a mini-Maga meme last summer, with various rightwing pseudocelebrities photographed themselves wasting plastic for no reason other than to “own the libs” who care about sea turtles and sustainability.

This week, Trump’s campaign manager Brad Parscale attempted to recapture the meme magic with a tweet comparing the efficacy of paper straws to “liberal progress”. “This is exactly what they would do to the economy as well,” he tweeted. “Squeeze it until it doesn’t work.” The campaign website is also selling packs of 10 plastic straws “laser engraved” with Trump’s name for $15, with the tagline: “Liberal paper straws don’t work.”

But if the campaign message was supposed to be “Vote for Trump because the libs are coming for your straws”, Trump himself failed to get the memo.

So there you have it. Between making numerous false and racist statements about elected representatives, saber-rattling against Iran, refusing to answer questions about his knowledge of criminal activity, conflating criticism of the Israeli government with antisemitism, and falsely attributing antisemitic language to his political opponents, Trump was mostly right about an issue, possibly by accident and presumably against the wishes of his campaign director.