Trump's 'hatred' of sharks sees spike in donations to conservation charities

Mr Trump has previously tweeted about his distaste for sharks as recently as 2013

New York

Wednesday 24 January 2018 23:06

Mr Trump's comments from long ago are fueling a fundraising spike for charities

(Mario Tama/Getty Images)

More than a decade ago, President Donald Trump allegedly sat around with his mistress watching television while talking about how much he hates sharks and would not mind if they al died

Now, those comments are coming back to bite him — in the sense that they are helping out the sharks of the world.

Donations have reportedly surged to shark conservation charities since Mr Trump’s hate of sharks were unearthed in a previously unpublished interview conducted between the magazine In Touch and adult film actress Stormy Daniels — who claims she had an affair with Mr Trump in 2006, just a year after he married his current wife.

The charities, for their part, are pretty jazzed.

“It can certainly be a challenge to raise money for a species that most people fear,” Cynthia Wilgren, the chief executive officer of the Atlantic White Shark Conservancy, told MarketWatch of their surging donations. “We have been receiving donations in Trump’s name since the story was published.”

Daniels says that she met with Mr Trump several times during her affair with him, and that he mentioned never giving money to shark charities while watching shark programming on television at one point.

Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far...

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1/30Donald Trump's least presidential moments so far...

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When author E Jean Carroll accused Trump of raping her, the president responded: “Number one, she’s not my type. Number two, it never happened. It never happened, OK?"

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Just before touching down at Stansted Airport for his state visit, Trump took time out to @ the London mayor Sadiq Khan on twitter. He said that Khan has done a "terrible job"as mayor and that he is a "stone cold loser"

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The president's official schedule sets aside the hours from 8 to 11am daily for "Executive Time". Further intermittent periods of "Executive Time" are scheduled throughout any given day, ranging from 15 minutes to 3 hours. His duties in these hours have not been officially disclosed, though Axios reports that he spends them watching TV, reading the newspapers and tweeting

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In this tweet from 13 November 2018, the president mocks Emmanuel Macron's suggestion of a "true, European army" by invoking the conflict between France and Germany in the world wars

The president has repeatedly claimed that the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, is a "rigged witch hunt"

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In the press conference that followed his landmark meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin, Trump stated that he saw no reason why Russia would have meddled in the 2016 US election. This contradicted a 2017 report by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence that found evidence of Russian interference in favour of Trump

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Following furious backlash in the US, the president claimed that he meant to say that he saw no reason why it would not have been Russia who meddled in the 2016 US election. As to why he would have intended to use such bizarre phrasing, he did not comment

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The president coloured in the US flag wrongly during a visit to a children's hospital in Columbus, Ohio. He added a blue stripe where in tradition, and statute, there have been only white and red stripes

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The president announced on Twitter that he was appointing Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State, much to the surprise of then Secretary of State Rex Tillerson

While addressing the issue of black athletes not standing for the national anthem in protest of police brutality, the president made reference to his catchphrase from reality TV show "The Apprentice": you're fired!

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Ever one for diplomacy, the president reportedly referred to African nations as "s***hole countries". Asked to confirm this when meeting with Nigeria's President Buhari, Trump stated that there are "some countries that are in very bad shape".

Reuters

Trump appeared to equate US foreign actions to those of Russian president Vladimir Putin, saying: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

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At the National Prayer Breakfast, Trump couldn’t help but to ask for prayers for the ratings on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s show to be good. Schwarzenegger took over as host of “The Apprentice” — which buoyed Trump’s celebrity status years ago

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Early in his presidency, Trump reportedly hung up the phone on Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull after the foreign leader angered him over refugee plans. Mr Trump later said that it was the “worst call” he had had so far

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Perhaps one of his most controversial policies while acting as president, Trump’s travel ban targeting predominantly Muslim countries has bought him a lot of criticism. The bans were immediately protested, and judges initially blocked their implementation. The Supreme Court later sided with the administration’s argument that the ban was developed out of concern for US security

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After Hurricane Harvey ravaged southeastern Texas, Trump paid the area a visit. While his response to the disaster in Houston was generally applauded, the president picked up some flack when he gave a speech outside Houston (he reportedly did not visit disaster zones), and praised the size of the crowds there

AP

During his first-ever speech to the United Nations General Assembly, Trump tried out a new nickname for North Korea leader Kim Jong-un: Rocket Man. He later tweaked it to be “little Rocket Man” as the two feuded, and threatened each other with nuclear war. During that speech, he also threatened to totally annihilate North Korea

After the attack on the London Bridge, Trump lashed out at London Mayor Sadiq Khan, criticising Khan for saying there was “no reason to be alarmed” after the attack. Trump was taking the comments out of context, as Khan was simply saying that the police had everything under control

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Never one not to mock his enemies, Trump mocked MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” co-host Mika Brzezinski, saying that she and co-host Joe Scarborough had approached him before his inauguration asking to “join” him. He noted that she was “bleeding badly from a face-lift” at the time, and that he said no

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Trump refused to condemn far-right extremists involved in violence at 'the march for the right' protests in Charlottesville, even after the murder of counter protester Heather Heyer

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Trump retweeted a cartoon showing a Trump-branded train running over a person whose body and head were replaced by a CNN avatar. He later deleted the retweet

Trump caught some flack when he tweeted a video showing him wrestling down an individual whose head had been replaced by a CNN avatar. Trump has singled CNN out in particular with his chants of “fake news”

Trump’s firing of former FBI Director James Comey landed him with a federal investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election that has caused many a headache for the White House. The White House initially said that the decision was made after consultation from the Justice Department. Then Mr Trump himself said that he had decided to fire him in part because he wanted the Russia investigation Mr Comey was conducting to stop

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Just three months into his presidency, Trump admitted that being president is harder than he thought it would be. Though Trump insisted on the 2016 campaign trail that doing the job would be easy for him, he admitted in an interview that living in the White House is harder than running a business empire

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Trump accused former president Barack Obama of wire tapping him on twitter. The Justice Department later clarified: Obama had not, in fact, done so

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Trump was never very happy about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.8 million ballots. So, he and White House voter-fraud commissioner Kris Kobach have claimed that anywhere between three and five million people voted illegally during the 2016 election. Conveniently, he says that all of those illegal votes went to Clinton. (There is no evidence to support that level of widespread voter fraud.)

Just days after taking office, Trump’s White House issued a statement on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, but didn’t mention “jews” or even the word “jewish” in the written statement

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Trump’s inauguration crowd was visibly, and noticeably, smaller than that of his predecessor, Barack Obama. But, he really wanted to have had the largest crowd on record. So, he praised it as the biggest crowd ever. Relatedly, Trump also claimed that it stopped raining in Washington at the moment he was inaugurated. It didn’t, the day was very dreary

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“I hope all sharks die,” Daniels told In Touch in the interview, which was conducted before Mr Trump became president.

Others have taken a different approach to this new way to join the resistance, like an individual who adopted a 13-foot female white shark named Lola.

Lola, of course, is too big to be kept in the anonymous individual’s pool or backyard pond, Newsweek reports, and is instead being tracked by the Shark Research Institute. That group, which has also seen a spike in their donations, says adopting a shark simply means paying $50 a year — or $150 for a lifetime adoption — and being notified whenever that shark is spotted.

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