Donald Trump suffered a senior moment at a security conference where defense contractors were forced to listen as the 80-year-old president rambled about magnets.
“I hope you’re gonna do magnets. Somebody out there, I hope, you’re all brilliant people, magnets. Do magnets, OK?” Trump told attendees at the Pennsylvania Defense & Innovation Summit on Wednesday.
“I’ll tell you how to make money. Do magnets,” he went on. “You’re doing a lot of great stuff. Do magnets. Because one thing we don’t have, but we are getting close, but do magnets.”
The president has a long history of confused comments on the topic. He told Fox News in November that magnets were vital to new technologies being developed in the United States, while also marveling that “nobody knows what a magnet is.”
That is not true. Physicists Hans Christian Ørsted, André-Marie Ampère, Michael Faraday, and James Clerk Maxwell formulated a set of equations in the 19th century to explain how electric currents in certain metals interact to underlie magnetic phenomena.
The advent of quantum mechanics in the 20th century confirmed their theories. Magnetic properties arise from the intrinsic spin motion of electrons in certain substances, which in turn accounts for the force of attraction between positively and negatively charged particles.
Trump’s inability to grasp these scientific principles has sparked mockery in the past. Online critics have noted that Trump’s sentiments on the topic recall “Miracles,” a 2010 song by hip-hop outfit Insane Clown Posse, which features the lyric: “F---ing magnets, how do they work?”
Donald Trump Jr., 47, does not appear to have inherited his father’s confusion about magnets—or at least, their ability to attract cash. The Financial Times reported in December that his venture firm, 1789 Capital, holds interests in a tiny rare earths start-up, Vulcan Elements, that was slated for a roughly $620 million Pentagon loan to increase the domestic industrial supply of magnets.
ProPublica then reported in May, just seven weeks before the president’s bewildering Wednesday demand that more defense contractors “do magnets, OK?”, that White House counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro had personally asked the Defense Department to greenlight that loan.
Officials at the Pentagon told the investigative outlet they’d been under pressure to move fast on the deal, telling reporters that because “the call came from the White House,” the feeling was “we have to get this done.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
