As expected, President Donald Trump‘s commencement speech at West Point on Saturday was packed with characteristically unhinged tangents. From drag queens to trophy wives, the president’s ramblings covered a wide range of bizarre topics in between shots at Russia, Biden, and Obama as he spoke to the graduating cadets.
However, one avenue of free-associative speculation Trump meandered along while speaking about military investment seemed to confirm that one of his much-derided beliefs remains intact: the president seems to genuinely believe that so-called “stealth” fighter jets—military aircraft designed to be difficult to detect by radar—are actually invisible.
“We are buying you new airplanes, brand new beautiful planes, redesigned planes, brand new planes, totally stealth planes,” Trump said, speaking to a proposed record increase in defense spending.
“I hope they’re stealth. I don’t know, that whole stealth thing, I’m sort of wondering.
“We shape a wing this way, they don’t see it. But the other way they see it? I’m not so sure, but that’s what they tell me!“
This is familiar territory for Trump, who has made similar remarks since at least 2017. In October of that year, Trump concerned reporters when discussing the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter in Puerto Rico.
“Amazing job,” Trump said at the time. “So amazing we are ordering hundreds of millions of dollars of new airplanes for the Air Force, especially the F-35. You like the F-35? … You can’t see it. You literally can’t see it. It’s hard to fight a plane you can’t see.”
“That’s an expensive plane you can’t see.”
At a Thanksgiving Day visit to a Coast Guard Station in Florida that same year, Trump doubled down on this seeming belief, saying he had asked “some Air Force guys” whether flying an “invisible” plane would look like what he had seen in films.
“I said, ‘How good is this plane?’ They said, ‘Well, sir, you can’t see it.’ I said, yeah, but in a fight—you know, a fight, like I watch in the movies—they fight, they’re fighting. How good is this? They say, ‘Well, it wins every time because the enemy cannot see it. Even if it’s right next to it, it can’t see it.’ I said, ‘That helps. That’s a good thing.’”
Years of experience as Commander in Chief do not seem to have steered Trump toward the realization that such planes, which are shaped to either deflect or absorb incoming radar signals used to track movement, are meant to be difficult to detect. But can still be seen by the naked eye. In 2020, there was this remark:
“[The F-35 is] the greatest fighter jet in the world, as you know, by far. Stealth. Totally stealth. You can’t see it. Makes it very difficult. I was asking a pilot, ‘What do you think is better: This one? This one? That one?’ Talking about Russian planes, Chinese planes. He said, ‘Well, the advantage we have is you can’t see it.’ So when we’re fighting, they can’t see us. I say, ‘That sounds like a really big advantage to me.’”
While Trump is no stranger to wild exaggerations and hyperbolic comparisons, the repeated factual inaccuracy over the invisibility capabilities of military aircraft continues to raise eyebrows.
British journalist Mehdi Hassan, in picking up on the most recent “invisible” planes comment, wrote that it was difficult to determine if such remarks are “ignorance” or “inanity.”
”His weirdness cannot be overstated,“ Hassan concluded.
