Donald J. Trump somehow claimed that under the CHIPS Act, companies weren't eligible for funding unless they had a transgender person running them. So, in his telling, businesses went hunting for transgender executives to get the money.
At this point, reporters covering Trump need a standing question for every single Republican they talk to: What, exactly, is the President talking about? Because his latest claim — that companies needed a transgender CEO to qualify for CHIPS Act money — isn't a policy position. It's not even a distortion of a real provision. It's fiction, invented on the spot, and it exists for one reason: because "transgender" is the word Trump reaches for whenever he wants to make something sound sinister.
"We had this ridiculous Chips Act where you get billions of dollars to a company, and they didn't even know what the hell to do with it," he insisted. "You give them billions of dollars, they say they're going to build. Nobody knew what to do with it."
"And of course, the standards were so high," he continued. "If you weren't transgender, as an example, you didn't qualify. So they get the money that hired, they look all over for transgender people to run the company. Large portions, they couldn't find them."
"They weren't into the chip-making business, I guess," he said. "They had other things on their mind. But this was the Biden fools, those idiots that almost destroyed our country."
Once again, I'm gonna ask if Jake Tapper caught any of that?
