Trump invents the ‘Watercane,’ a hurricane but wetter

Somewhere a meteorologist just closed their laptop and walked into the sea.

Tuesday night in Greenville, North Carolina, Donald Trump got around to Hurricane Helene, the 2024 storm that wrecked the western half of the state. He gave it a rebrand. “We call it a watercane.” Who “we” is, he didn’t say. Nobody at the National Hurricane Center has been informed.

His scientific finding: there’s never been a hurricane “that threw out more water than that.” A hurricane. With water. Stop the presses.

To be fair, he has a back catalogue. In 2018 Florence was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen from the standpoint of water.” In 2019 there was the Sharpie on the Dorian map. And in 2025 he said he’d start “phasing out” FEMA, the agency that actually turns up after the watercane leaves.

He used the storm to call Roy Cooper, the former governor now running for Senate, “horrible” on recovery. Disaster-response tips from the man who wanted to phase out disaster response. Very wet advice.