You’d have to visit my other blog to know it, but I’m an electric vehicle enthusiast, having driven an EV since 2016. This post is not about alleged cognitive decline in Donald Trump. Trump was a birther in 2011, and you can’t decline much lower than that. What Trump said in Los Vegas to a crowd seriously in danger of heat prostration started:

So we have a country that’s in trouble. We’re going to end the mandate on electric one day.

And he went on to elaborate with a fanciful short ramble about an imaginary trip in an electric boat ending in disaster and the existential dilemma of whether it’s better to be electrocuted by a boat or eaten by a shark. My response is more about the policy implications of what Trump said than about cognitive decline. Either way, Trump is clueless, saying essentially that:

• Electric boats don’t go very far.
• If the battery dies, the boat sinks because they are very heavy.
• If you stand on a sinking electric boat you will be electrocuted.

I like the road trip videos of Norwegian YouTuber Bjørn Nyland, that include his electric car being carried on electric ferry boats.

The battery is rather heavy in order to power a boat that carries 120 cars plus 360 passengers.

Ferries go slowly, but not so much the Voltari 260 electric speedboat, with a top speed of 60 mph and the ability to pace a swimmer for 14 hours on a charge.

Of course the electrocution idea is nonsense. The US Navy has submarines that run on batteries.

The risk to America is a president who thinks he knows something, when he is abysmally ignorant. If Trump prefers electrocution to being eaten by a shark, I won’t attempt to stand in his way.