RICHARD ORD: Trump drew the shortest straw... and it exploded!

Fins can only get, erm, worse. A shark's eye view of the 'exploding' straw crisis. Image created by AI.

If brains were paper straws, Donald Trump wouldn’t have enough to blow his wig off. In one of his many bizarre and disturbing utterances since taking office, President Trump revealed this little known ‘fact’ about paper drinking straws: They can ‘explode’.

Exploding straws! Who’d have thunk it? As it turns out, only he appears to have thunk it. I’ve yet to find a single case of injury from an exploding paper straw.

And yet, in front of millions of TV viewers, the 45th and 47th (and only orange) US president said paper straws explode.

Oddly, it wasn’t the main reason he was signing an executive order to reinstate plastic straws. A guy to his right listed the reasons for the urgent reinstatement of plastic straws before handing over the paperwork. He told us the environmental impact of plastic versus paper straws was ‘entirely unclear’. What ‘entirely unclear’ means also remains unclear. Did they weigh up the evidence? On one hand, there are environmentalists, backed by science, who argue that Americans alone use more than 300 million plastic straws a day that take 200 years to degrade and choke marine life. On the other, there’s the President who doesn’t like ‘em. Does that make the science entirely unclear?

This guy went on to explain that the use of plastic straws costs ‘an absolute ton of money.’ Wow, a whole ‘ton’. They’ve really drilled down into the detail on that one. The final straw for me was when he said consumers were left ‘wildly dissatisfied’. What, even the environmentally-concerned consumers? And how does ‘wild dissatisfaction’ show itself? A screaming tantrum? Unsubstantiated claims perhaps? “My paper straw just exploded! It really did.”

Nevertheless, Trump signed the paper straw death warrant, declaring ‘These things don’t work. On occasions they break, they explode.’ He continued, ‘If something’s hot, they don’t last very long... it’s a ridiculous situation.’ As ridiculous as trying to drink hot fluids through a paper straw perhaps. Who does that? But what of marine life? Trump explained that in exhaustive detail, saying ‘I don’t think plastic is going to affect a shark very much as they are munching their way through the ocean.’ If there are any lingering doubts about the rising lunacy of this presidency, this bizarre episode was the straw that not so much broke the camel’s back, as blew it to pieces.