Faced with a litany of criminal charges, Donald Trump on Sunday told a campaign rally in Iowa that he would prefer to die by electrocution rather than be eaten by a shark if he ever found himself on a rapidly sinking, electrically powered boat.
The former president and frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination delivered the bizarre remarks during a speech in the community of Ottumwa. He was pontificating over batteries for electric powered boats while recounting a conversation he claimed to have had with a boat manufacturer in South Carolina.
“If I’m sitting down and that boat is going down and I’m on top of a battery and the water starts flooding in, I’m getting concerned, but then I look 10 yards to my left and there’s a shark over there, so I have a choice of electrocution and a shark, you know what I’m going to take? Electrocution,” Trump said. “I will take electrocution every single time, do we agree?”
Trump then continued criticizing the prospect of any other sustainable energy technologies and claiming he would repeal the Joe Biden White House’s electric vehicle mandate.
“These people are crazy,” Trump said.
Trump’s remarks drew ridicule from his political opponents, including Ron Filipkowski, a Florida criminal defense attorney who is a frequent critic of the ex-president. Filipkowski noted that Trump was “slurring his words” when he started “riffing about how he would rather be electrocuted to death than be eaten by a shark”.
Slurring his words, Trump starts riffing about how he would rather be electrocuted to death than be eaten by a shark. pic.twitter.com/yqPrxWRzN3
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) October 1, 2023
Trump has previously confirmed he is “not a big fan” of sharks, and Stormy Daniels has recounted his obsession with sharks in a 2011 interview and her 2018 autobiography.
Hush-money payments to Daniels resulted in one of four criminal indictments pending against Trump. The other indictments charge him with retaining classified documents after his presidency and of efforts to subvert his defeat in the 2020 election against Biden.
On Monday, in New York, a state judge is set to begin hearing allegations of fraud within the Trump Organization in a civil trial that could see the former president and his family business paying hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The case has already threatened to end his business career.
Nonetheless, Trump has enjoyed dominant polling leads over other candidates pursuing the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. And most polls find that an electoral rematch between Biden and Trump next year would be a close, competitive race.
