June 16, 2015

13 Tweets That Definitively Prove That Donald Trump Is Not a Scientist

The reality TV star has a long history of firing the facts.

Alex Brandon/AP

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Donald Trump has announced he’s running for president! And while the real estate and necktie tycoon has no chance of actually winning, a White House bid would provide him with an even larger platform to spread his unique blend of anti-science nonsense. Here are some examples:

1. Climate Change. Trump contends that global warming is a “hoax.” Here he is on Fox News last year, citing extreme winter weather as evidence that climate scientists are wrong:

He has made similar comments on Twitter:

2. Vaccines and autism. Trump is an advocate for the completely baseless theory that vaccines can cause autism. “I’ve seen people where they have a perfectly healthy child, and they go for the vaccinations, and a month later the child is no longer healthy,” he said on Fox in 2012. “It happened to somebody that worked for me recently. I mean, they had this beautiful child, not a problem in the world. And all of a sudden, they go in, they get this monster shot. You ever see the size of it? It’s like they’re pumping in—you know, it’s terrible, the amount. And they pump this into this little body. And then all of the sudden, the child is different a month later. And I strongly believe that’s it.”

Trump claims to be “all for vaccinations” but argues they should be given “separately and over an extended period of time, not all at one time”—an idea that medical experts reject. Back in September, Trump went on an extended Twitter rant about the issue:

3. Ebola. Last summer, Trump protested the decision to transport American health care workers who had been infected with Ebola in West Africa back to the United States for treatment:

As my colleague Tim McDonnell has explained, “Health care experts, meanwhile, insisted that the risk was minimal; the two patients Trump was talking about were ultimately brought back to the US and successfully treated without infecting anyone else.” What’s more, doctors even used blood donated by these survivors to help treat other Ebola patients. But Trump was soon back at it, accusing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of somehow covering up the dangers posed by the disease:

This story was updated following Trump’s announcement that he’s running for president.

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

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It’s risky, but also unavoidable: A full one-third of the dollars that we need to pay for the journalism you rely on has to get raised in December. A good December means our newsroom is fully staffed, well-resourced, and on the beat. A bad one portends budget trouble and hard choices.

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