President Donald Trump segued into a bizarre rant during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Friday, about how Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) supposedly wants a train to be built from the mainland across the Pacific Ocean to her state — a plan she has never advocated for.
“She wanted a tunnel from the mainland to Hawaii," said Trump. "Then she said, ‘Well, we can’t do that, so we’re gonna build a railroad to Hawaii.’ Do you remember? She’s a current, sitting senator, a Democrat. She wants a railroad to go to Hawaii. You know who that is, right?”
The New Republic reported on the incident, speculating that it may be another potential indication of the president's cognitive decline.
"The president’s statement is a nesting doll of inaccuracies, stemming back to a 2019 joke Hirono made regarding misinformation about the content of the Green New Deal," wrote Robert McCoy. "At the time, conservative media outlets and politicians were spreading the false claim that the Green New Deal would eliminate air travel and replace it with high-speed rail."
This claim itself was based on a bad-faith interpretation of a whitepaper from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), which explained the Green New Deal allowed for some emissions to be offset rather than eliminated “because we aren’t sure that we’ll be able to fully get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast.” Even though this line was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement that some emissions would be inevitable even with aggressive climate reforms, it was seized and quoted out of context by a number of right-wing commentators, including Trump himself, to claim the Green New Deal prohibited air travel and beef, neither of which it did.
When Hirono, a supporter of the proposal, was asked about all of this at the time by a Fox News anchor, she sarcastically replied, “That would be pretty hard for Hawaii,” which appears to be the source of Trump's latest false claim.