As America Baked, Burned & Drowned In 2017, All We Heard Was The Sound Of Shitstain's Tweets

[hatrack]

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Great Plains aflame

The February heatwave primed states like Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas for weeks of wildfire activity. The likelihood of that kind of heatwave was tripled by climate change. One major blaze in southern Kansas is now the largest wildfire on record in the state.

Perhaps the increasingly worrying links between extreme heat, fires, and climate change would have been the talk around office water coolers, but we were all a little preoccupied at the time with an ongoing feud between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Trump. No, really, we were. The celebrity politicians were bickering about The Apprentice — an NBC show that Trump executive produces and formerly hosted. Schwarzenegger was the current host, and the show was suffering from poor ratings, according to no less an authority than the president of the United States. In his opening remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump said: “I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings.” That breakfast was on Feb. 2. We were reading about the feud until March.

Grounding Arizona

On June 20, 40 airline flights out of Phoenix, Arizona, were canceled or delayed because it was literally too hot to fly. Temperatures reached 119 degrees F, and airplanes just couldn’t achieve the kind of lift required to take flight. Various news outlets covered the story with some context about how heat affects planes — but according to an analysis by Media Matters, major television networks “totally failed” to discuss the connection to climate change.

On June 21, President Trump did mention air travel, but not in reference to the planes that were grounded due to heat. “Just landed in Iowa,” he tweeted on his way to a campaign-like rally he held after he was already president. That month, Trump’s tweets about former FBI Director James Comey, the Russia investigation, and the border wall dominated the news cycle. Trump claimed he had recordings of conversations with Comey. The House Intelligence Committee then asked him to furnish the tapes on June 23. They never materialized.

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California burnin’

No state felt the fury of a climate change-fueled wildfires this year quite like California. Blazes barreled through wine country in October, torching marijuana farms, shriveling grape vines, and forcing hundreds of people from their homes. Even before a second round of fires descended on Southern California this December, the state had already been through its worst wildfire season on record.

The United States was transfixed at the time by a fight Trump had picked with Colin Kaepernick, the former NFL quarterback who in 2016 started a trend of football players refusing to kneel for the National Anthem to protest police brutality against African Americans. The controversy exploded into the national spotlight in October when Trump called on the NFL to “fire” the roughly two dozen players who kneeled. The president tweeted that the players showed “total disrespect to our Flag & Country.”

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https://grist.org/article/trump-tweets-overshadowed-these-major-climate-stories-in-2017/

[ck4829]

1. But yet his tweets continue to be repeated, copied and pasted, talked about, etc.

Stop. Respecting. The. Office.