Donald Trump reportedly asked his national-security aides and administration officials if China was creating hurricanes and then firing them toward the US using a ‘hurricane gun,’ Rolling Stone reports.
Three persons, including two former senior administration officials told Rolling Stone that Trump raised the issue when he first got into office in 2017. He wanted to know if China had a secret weapon to create and then launch hurricanes at the United States and if they did could it be seen as an act of war, which would require a military response from the United States.
“It was almost too stupid for words,” a former Trump official familiar with the inquiry said. “I did not get the sense he was joking at all.”
“I was present [once] when he asked if China ‘made’ hurricanes to send to us,” another former senior Trump official said. Trump “wanted to know if the technology existed. One guy in the room responded, ‘Not to the best of my knowledge, sir.’ I kept it together until I got back to my office… I do not know where the [then-]president would have heard about that… He was asking about it around the time, maybe a little before, he asked people about nuking hurricanes.”
Trump kept asking about this secret weapon throughout much of his first year then he started to drop the topic, and occasionally joked about it well into his second year in office.
However, the incident became a joke among some top Trump officials who recalled the ‘Hurricane gun’ thing, according to Rolling Stone.
Trump’s former press secretary turn critic Stephanie Grisham, told the outlet that she is “not surprised” by the news that Trump thought China had a hurricane gun.
“Stuff like that was not unusual for him. He would blurt out crazy things all the time, and tell aides to look into it or do something about it. His staff would say they’d look into it knowing that more often than not, he’d forget about it quickly — much like a toddler,” she added.
In 2019, Axios reported that Trump suggested dropping nuclear bombs in hurricanes to stop them from hitting the United States during a hurricane briefing at the White House.
“I got it. I got it. Why don’t we nuke them?” Trump reportedly said in the meeting. “They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?”
Aides told him at the time that they will look into it.
