Former President Donald Trump's rants about preferring to die from electrocution to getting eaten by a shark have raised eyebrows among political observers, but Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker decided to do a deep-dive analysis to discern what, if anything, the former president is trying to convey.
Parker begins by recapping Trump's entire story about electric boat batteries potentially electrocuting boaters -- or potentially making boats so heavy that they could sink and leave their owners vulnerable to shark attacks.
In recapping this story, Parker concluded that it is "full of fabrication, riddled with illogic, defying the laws of physics and, by turns, rambling and hyperbolic."
She then offers quotes from an actual expert in maritime physics to demonstrate why the former president's apparent anxieties about electric boat batteries don't hold water.
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"We have cargo ships that carry thousands of tons of cargo, so based on Archimedes’ principle — you just have to displace as much water as the weight of the battery pack," Jason Siegel, a research scientist in the University of Michigan’s mechanical engineering department, explained to Parker.
Siegel also said that worries about getting electrocuted by boat batteries were wildly overstated, as it would require someone to "become part of an electrical circuit between the positive and negative terminals of a battery," which could realistically only happen if they were to "lay across the battery pack."
Even this is unlikely, he added, because the systems are "designed in a way that you don't have access to the electrical connections of the battery pack."
The Post sent a series of questions about Trump's battery-shark rant to the Trump campaign, which responded by angrily lashing out.
"The Washington Post is a pathetic institution no longer worth the paper it’s printed on and they should be embarrassed for wasting time writing a story about boats sinking when our country is sinking from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed leadership," a campaign spokesperson said.
