Donald Trump is not known for staying on topic. When asked about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, his young and influential political ally, he switches to the construction of a ballroom in the White House. If you put him on a stage at a campaign rally a few days before an election, you might hear him discussing the size of golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals. And of course, there’s a chance that “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” will show up when he brings up the topic of immigration.
Metaphorical magnets
Lately, the president has seen fit to repeatedly digress into something he doesn’t understand and has never had to explain. Magnets. How he came to be so fixated and yet so wrong about a phenomenon normally covered in seventh-grade science classes remains a mystery. But it’s clear he has strong feelings about it. Trump’s main conclusion seems to be that magnetism is fundamentally inexplicable and therefore unreliable as an element of human technology. Here we look at his story of wrestling with the physical principle that allows you to attach pictures to your refrigerator.
Believe it or not. Trump actually used to like magnets. At least in a metaphorical sense. In the years leading up to his 2016 presidential campaign, he continued to play the role of business guru, using his Twitter account to spread advice like this: “Set the example and you’ll be a magnet for the right people. That’s the best way to work with people you like.”
Trump tweeted several versions of this quote — which comes from his 2009 book, “Think Like a Champion: An Informal Education In Business and Life” — in 2014 and 2015, apparently because he liked the way it sounded. But when he became a presidential candidate, he began talking about magnets in a negative (though still metaphorical) light. On the campaign trail, Trump promised to turn off the “jobs and benefits magnet” that attracts immigrants to the United States. In 2018, when he argued that armed teachers would prevent school shootings, he tweeted that a “‘gun-free’ school is a magnet for bad people.” And in a nonsensical section of a 2019 speech to the Faith & Freedom Coalition, he accused Democrats of failing to address “the magnets of child smuggling.”
Although Trump had not yet revealed his ignorance of literal magnetism, some of his critics early drew a connection between him and the Insane Clown Posse’s 2010 song “Miracles,” in which the rap duo famously asks, “Fucking magnets, how do they work?” Early in the 2016 election cycle, a Twitter user posted a meme of ICP’s Shaggy 2 Dope saying the magnet line with the caption: “Trump doesn’t know how magnets work. #LittleKnownCandidateFacts.” It was a general attack on Trump’s intelligence that would later prove remarkably accurate.
Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System
During his first term, Trump repeatedly criticized the design of the new Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carriers and was reportedly fixated on one element in particular: the Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS), which launches aircraft using electrical currents and replaces the older steam-powered catapults. Shortly after taking office in 2017, he claimed he was informed that there were problems with the new system. It “costs hundreds of millions of dollars more and it’s not good,” he said, and one would have to be “Albert Einstein to understand it.”
In a 2018 meeting with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Trump again talked about magnetic catapults. “They use magnets instead of steam,” he complained. “This is honestly ridiculous.” He further claimed that the modernized launch system had technical problems and was too expensive. At a 2019 National Republican Congressional Committee dinner, he said, “You have to go to MIT to find out how this damn thing works.” He seemed to mistakenly believe that EMALS didn’t work at all. “We have an aircraft carrier, you can’t launch planes from the damn thing,” he said.
Elevator haters
After being voted out of office in 2020, Trump had little reason to mention magnets, but as he began his comeback in 2024, his strange distaste for them returned loudly. At a rally in Iowa during the Republican primary, he railed against not only the “stupid electric catapults” of the Ford carriers, but also the installation of magnetic elevators for the planes instead of hydraulic ones.
This time he added a new theory about the properties of magnets. “Think about it, magnets,” he said. “All I know about magnets is this: Give me a glass of water. I’ll drop it on the magnets. That’s it for the magnets.” Trump apparently suggested that magnets were unsuitable for a seagoing vessel, but as many commentators noted, water does not destroy a magnet or weaken its magnetic properties.
In February 2025, back in the White House, Trump once again returned to the hated magnetic elevators at the swearing in of Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. Moving on from a digression in which he expressed his dissatisfaction with price negotiations with Boeing on the new Air Force One jets, he began to fuss over cost overruns at the Gerald R. Ford.
“They have all magnetic elevators to lift 25 planes at a time, 20 planes at a time,” he said. “And instead of using hydraulics, like tractors that can withstand everything from hurricanes to lightning, they used magnets. It’s a new theory, magnets are supposed to lift the planes, and it doesn’t work.”
Trump also tested his routine during remarks about the crew of the USS George Washington in Japan during a trip to East Asia last month, urging them to declare their support for steam cartridges instead of the electromagnetic system.
“Let me ask you the second question,” he continued. “Hydraulics for your elevators or magnets? You know, the new thing is magnets. So instead of using hydraulics, where lightning can hit you and everything’s fine, you take a little glass of water, drop it on the magnets, and I don’t know what happens.” He then promised to sign an executive order to ensure that all aircraft carriers would be built with steam cartridges and hydraulic elevators, not magnets.
The China connection
This week, Trump delivered his most confusing comments yet on magnets, confirming that he doesn’t have the slightest grasp on the subject.
In an interview with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, Trump discussed his trade war with China, which eased somewhat after he and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed last month to roll back certain retaliatory tariffs. As part of this temporary truce, China also agreed to suspend restrictions on the export of rare earths, some of which are used to make magnets. The nation leads the world by far in refining these elements for use in electronic devices.
“President Xi was willing to do the rare earth thing, which are magnets,” Trump told Ingraham. “Now nobody knows what a magnet is. If you don’t have a magnet, you don’t build a car. You don’t build a computer. You don’t build TVs and radios and all the other things – you don’t build anything.” Trump went on to describe his conversations with Xi. “About the tariffs, I called, I said, ‘Listen, here’s the story. You play the magnet. I’ll play the tariff against you.'”
Trump did not explain why he believes magnets are fundamentally mysterious. But that could hardly have been a slip of the tongue, because he said the same thing later that same day.
That evening, in the Oval Office at the swearing in of businessman Sergio Gor as ambassador to India, Trump talked again about China, tariffs – and of course magnets. “China wanted to hit us with rare earths,” he said. “Now everyone says, ‘What does that mean?’ Magnets. If China refused to supply magnets – because they have a monopoly on magnets, because they were allowed to – it happened over a period of 32 years – then there would be no car built in the world, there would be no radio, no TV, no internet, nothing, because magnets are such a part of it – Now no one knows what magnets are, and not overly sophisticated, but to build a magnet system it would take two years.
How long will it be before we hear more philosophical musings from the president about magnets? No matter when, where or on what topic, he is drawn to that topic like an invisible force. And he seems increasingly convinced that they are some kind of plot to undermine America’s power and prosperity. Whatever he once heard about unreliable magnets must have really stuck.