Donald Trump has dug up his bonkers old shark tale.
The 80-year-old president was speaking about new executive orders on hunting and fishing at an event in the Rose Garden on Thursday when he stumbled onto an old favorite.
On the campaign trail, the then-Republican nominee developed a taste for a nonsensical story about battery-powered boats and sharks, and more than two years later he stood in the White House and reprised it once more.
He said he had been speaking with a mid-size ship manufacturer and asked them what the biggest challenge they faced with electric boats.
“He said, ‘The weight is enormous. We can barely carry that much weight,’ because, you know, electric is a much heavier form of propulsion, and they said the weight is enormous.
“I said, ‘Let me ask you a question. If you get a little leak and the water starts coming in your boat and you’re in—do you get electrocuted or not?’
“He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’ And I said, ‘So here’s my question...’ You remember this? I used to say it during the campaign, driving the press crazy, but people found it sort of amusing.
“I said, ‘So if I’m in an electric boat and I see them going down and the water’s pouring in, so I know I’m going to be electrocuted, but five yards away there are sharks, do I take the electrocution or do I go swimming with the sharks?’ And you know what my answer was? I’ll take the electrocution, OK? I’ll take the electrocution—but he didn’t know how to answer the question. He said, ‘No idea.’”
He left people dumbfounded with the same question many times before, in 2023 and 2024.
Multiple times on the trail, he said he had asked a South Carolina boat manufacturer a question in September 2023: If the boat sinks, would the people onboard be electrocuted?
Each time, he said the manufacturer said they had never been asked that question before. It also came with the same caveat: that if passengers jumped, they would be eaten by sharks.
“The [boat’s] battery is now underwater and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there, by the way, a lot of shark attacks lately,” he said to a Las Vegas audience in June 2024.
He said he asked the businessman: “Do I get electrocuted… or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted? Because I will tell you, he did not know the answer.”
Again, he revealed that the man said that “No one has ever asked me that question.”
He said it for the first time in October 2023, in Iowa, one month after the supposed interaction with the businessman. “You know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” he mused that time around. “I will take electrocution every single time.”
He said it again in Houston in the following month, in November. “I said, ‘What would happen if you’re out at sea and your boat sinks and you have a whole big electric deal under you—would you get electrocuted?’ He said, ‘You know, nobody’s ever asked me that question.’” That time, he had been talking about the Army wanting to build electric tanks before going off on a tangent.
Trump was panned by the media for his use of the story, which he pushed back on in June 2024 on the campaign trail, saying, “It’s actually not crazy. It’s sort of a smart story, right?”
He was clearly satisfied with this conclusion and did it again in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the following month.
“If there’s a shark about 10 yards away, do I get electrocuted or do I go with the shark?… because I will take electrocution all day long.” It was his first time doing a rally alongside future Vice President JD Vance.
“The Washington Post is a pathetic institution no longer worth the paper it’s printed on, and they should be embarrassed for wasting time writing a story about boats sinking when our country is sinking from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s failed leadership,” then-Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told the Post in a statement in July 2024.
It wasn’t the only mystifying riff he went on during Thursday’s Rose Garden speech. Continuing his aquatic theme, he got himself in a terrible muddle trying to talk about duck hunters.
“And we also strongly support your duck hunters,” he said. “The duck hunter hunters thing is a big deal.
“And they came to us and they met with my people and they came to me, my people, and, uh, we are fully in favor of our duck hunters. Who would think that’s a big deal?
“But I, I hear I got 100 percent of the duck hunters vote, right? What did they get there? 100? If there was 150, I would have gotten 150 percent. I mean, the competition wasn’t that tough.”
As for sharks, Trump’s never liked them. “Sorry folks, I’m just not a fan of sharks,” he said on Twitter in 2013. “And don’t worry, they will be around long after we are gone.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
