Former President Donald Trump went on a tangent at a campaign event in Iowa on Sunday about how he’d prefer electrocution to being attacked by a shark during a rant against electric boats.
He recounted a conversation with a boater he’d had expressing concerns about the weight and size of batteries needed for electric boats saying, “Let’s say your boat goes down and I’m sitting on top of this big, powerful battery and the boat’s going down, do I get electrocuted? And he said honestly nobody’s ever asked me that question.”
Trump then went on to describe the hypothetical sinking of an electric boat.
“But if I’m sitting down, and that boat’s going down, and I’m on top of a battery, and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned,” Trump said. “But then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there. So I have a choice of electrocution or shark, you know what I’m gonna take? Electrocution. I will take electrocution every single time.”
Trump has long expressed his animosity toward sharks, tweeting in 2013, “I’m just not a fan of sharks – and don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone.”
He wrote in a second post the same day: “Sharks are last on my list – other than perhaps the losers and haters of the World!”
And in 2020, Trump indicated that his opinion on sharks had not at all shifted.
He told rallygoers at a Pennsylvania event that he’s “not a big fan of sharks” and recounted rejecting requests to help preserve sharks.
“I have people calling me up, ‘Sir, we want to have a fund to save the shark, it’s called Save the Shark,’” he said in 2020. “I say, ‘No thank you, I have other things I can contribute to.’”
Stormy Daniels—the porn star who alleged having an affair with Trump in 2006—similarly noted in an interview that Trump “is obsessed with sharks.” Trump has denied the affair, though his then-attorney Michael Cohen paid her $130,000 through a shell company Cohen had set up in the lead up to the 2016 election.
“He was watching Shark Week and he was watching a special about the U.S.S. something and it sank and it was like the worst shark attack in history,” Daniels said in the interview. “He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’ He was like riveted.”
