June 12, 2019 12:11 PM UTC

The Actual President of the United States of America

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• by: Colorado Pols

Both President Trump and Democratic Presidential hopeful Joe Biden were in Iowa on Tuesday as part of their respective 2020 election campaigns. The two men shot a lot of arrows back and forth, a verbal battle that captured most of the headlines related to the word “Iowa.” But those headlines obscured a couple of really strange comments from Trump on other issues, which thankfully were not missed by Aaron Rupar of Vox.com.

Beyond parody — Fox Business cuts away from Trump’s speech right after he laments, bizarrely, that tractors can’t hook up to the internet pic.twitter.com/hbYoYm2UgO

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 11, 2019

Here we have President Trump commiserating with Iowa farmers about the sad fact that their tractors don’t connect to the Internet:

“We secured nearly $1.2 billion dollars to expand rural broadband, which you need very badly. They have not treated the Midwest well with broadband, with anything having to do with the word ‘computer.’ I look at some of those tractors and they don’t even hook up. [Pols emphasis] They’re all set, but you don’t have the capability here in terms of your infrastructure.”

Senator Cory Gardner (R-Yuma) is the son of a tractor salesman who regularly appears on national political interviews with tractors in the background.

Maybe the Gardner family can sell Iowa some of them Internet Tractors.

Later in his remarks on Tuesday, Trump claimed that California is no longer going to burn down because it listened to him on the importance of cleaning up those dirty forests:

“They were saying it was global warming — could have had something to do with it — but you need forest management. You can’t let 15 and 20 years of leaves and broken trees and dead wood, that after the first 18 months is dry as a bone. You can’t let that be there. You have to clean it. You have to clean those floors of the forest, and you’re going to see a big difference. [Pols emphasis]

And actually, they mocked me. They said, ‘Oh, what’s he doing? He’s talking about sweeping the floors…well, I don’t use the word “sweeping,” but you have to have forest management. And all of a sudden about four weeks after that happened they learned I was right, and now they are managing the forest as least as much as they could — they have a long way to go, because there’s a lot of it. But when you look, year after year, you see California mostly burning down. It’s management. And I think they’re going to do a much better job.” [Pols emphasis]

Here’s the link to that video clip if you are so inclined. In fairness to Trump, it is true that he didn’t previously use the word “sweeping”…he called it forest “raking.”

Anyhoo, there are 510 days until the November 2020 election.