What President Trump means for surfing

In a coffee shop in San Clemente sits a cluck of feathered Orange County Republican housewives. It’s their monthly book club meeting. Running the group is a woman who’s hair is a familiar over-fried blond and she looks like a shitty, part-time real estate agent, polyester pants suit and all. She uses the word “immigrants” with such disdain.

Just a stone’s throw from Trestles, chatter builds over a renewed fight over the toll road and the mess that is the shuttered San Onofre nuke plant remains unsolved, these women have gathered to discuss one-time Republican presidential contender Marco Rubio’s autobiography. But as Rubio knows all too well, the conversation quickly turns to Donald Trump.

After listening to their close-minded nonsense for long enough, I walk out with my faith in humanity reduced further, but wonder what Trump presidency would mean for surfing… the comb over, toll roads, nuke waste and all?

Trump exists in that small but distinguished group of climate change naysayers. To him it’s a farce. More accurately, it’s “bullshit.” Our friends in Maldives and Polynesia who are already feeling the creeping tide of inevitability might disagree, but to the man with fingers too stubby to throw a shaka, it seems science is just fiction.

“[Al] Gore wants us to clean up our factories and plants in order to protect us from global warming, when China and other countries couldn’t care less. It would make us totally noncompetitive in the manufacturing world, and China, Japan and India are laughing at America’s stupidity,” Trump has said.

“Liki liki lui, manatees are screwy, I’ll build the best wall you’ve ever see’een.”

Laugh if you will China and India, just be careful not to choke. Air quality in Los Angeles has steadily improved over the decades, while the air in Beijing or Delhi, not so much.

Trump positions himself as a “builder.” His operating thesis is that, “good development enhances the environment.”

That may be true, but only if you’re talking about Bobby’s camp at G-Land or adding a pool on Tavarua.

“I have a great environmental record,” says the man who’s developed 11 luxury golf courses. According to his science, building a golf course on sand dunes will actually preserve them—the sand “wouldn’t blow away in a storm.”

If that truly is the case, he’s got the Outer Banks vote on lock. And Hossegor could definitely use a few more pitch-and putts, don’t you think?

“I would consider myself an environmentalist in the true sense of the word,” famously said Trump during a scuffle over a golf course in Scotland in 2008.

The only problem with that statement is that even he doesn’t believe it. This is a man that has called manatees “stupid” because they get hit by boats…

Of course you can vote for Trump, just don’t be surprised when somebody tees off where you used to check the surf.