Girl About Globe | Trump and Typhoons

Linda Kennedy

If you can hashtag a nightmare, I just had #MakeAHurricaneEightAgain. A bad dream about Donald Trump and typhoons.
The cause was the proximity of Typhoon Haima and the third Presidential TV debate, both of which I had followed closely. It was a perfect storm. Or rather, wasn’t.
I was visiting in Macau when the T8 was hoisted by its Weather Bureau. It was a bit blowy. Later in the day it started to drizzle. Maybe it reached a power drizzle. I looked out from Taipa across the bridge. It was empty of cars: a scene from an apocalypse in an afternoon that was just a little inclement.
In Macau, was this typhoon deserving of the 8 signal?
That night, the dream commenced with Trump’s voice saying scornfully: ‘That one is a total 3’. The dream was set, a bit weirdly, after the election. I had gone out on a dream limb (which wasn’t swaying as the wind wasn’t that strong) and Trump had lost to Clinton. He had nothing to do. Long known for his number categorisation of women, he had decided to switch to typhoons. ‘Haima? Who called that an 8?’
Dream Donald had come to Macau to launch this Trump typhoon classification. It had a reverse value system of his classification of women. The uglier the typhoon, the higher the number. And it gave him a new hashtag, #MakeAHurricaneEightAgain; similar enough to his old hashtag of #MakeAmericaGreatAgain for him not to have to master much new material.
But Macau’s meteorologists weren’t happy with the way they heard Trump discussing their weather phenomenon.
Trump: ‘Haima? A storm, you say. Does she have nice eyes?’
Meteorologist: ‘She has very still eyes. Well one of them.’
Trump: ‘Still eyes are my type. Where are my Tic-Tacs?’
Upon challenge, Trump denied everything: ‘No one respects typhoons more than me. I respect them bigly. They are named after women. I love women’.
When I woke, to a sunny Saturday, I pondered on the real life possibilities of Trump coming to Macau. To open a new casino? To make a fresh start somewhere his gambling skillset would count? Or to start alliances for a future political run, contending, ‘current typhoon classification is a conspiracy against oil companies. I’ll regrade those typhoons. We won’t let them lose a day’s petrol.’
Or because it’s somewhere he thinks he knows the language? He used the term ‘hombres’ in the debate. Foreign nuance isn’t a Trump strong point. ‘Spanish is the same as Portuguese, right?”
As to why my subconscious was obsessing over weather and world politics, hard to say. It may have had its origins in fashion. You see, pre-Haima, I had had my typhoon chic ready. Wellington boots. Stylish ones. ‘Wrong,’ Trump would have muttered, if I somehow ended up in a fashion TV debate with him. Trump won’t have anything to do with this initiative, but all observatories should have a Welly 8 signal. When it’s hoisted, you know it’s going to rain hard enough to wear your wellies all day.
The most drenched I got during that Typhoon 8 was from the sweat on my brow when I woke, before realizing it had all been a dream. But there was a tiny pang of regret: Trump’s involvement with weather might have seen funds going into climate research. There’s a man who would finance solutions to humidity problems. Women – this woman, anyway – might respect that.
When I got back to Hong Kong, things were different. Haima was a total 8 in Hong Kong. Even Donald Trump, using whatever classification, would agree with that one.