A blind, wormlike amphibian that burrows underground has been named after Donald Trump [View all]

[octoberlib]

When President Trump announced his plan to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement last year, he said he was benching the United States in the global fight against climate change because he wanted the rest of the world to stop “laughing at us.”

“We don’t want other leaders and other countries laughing at us anymore, and they won’t be,” Trump vowed from a podium in the White House Rose Garden in June 2017. “They won’t be.”

But the name of a newly discovered amphibian species reveals just how hearty a laugh critics of the president abroad are having at his expense — and on the very issue he cited as he promised to protect American dignity.

A London-based sustainable building materials company, EnviroBuild, saw a resemblance between the serpentine creature, which is nearly blind and burrows underground, and Trump, who has called the evidence of global warming a “hoax.” EnviroBuild, which paid $25,000 for the naming rights at an auction this month, said on Tuesday that it chose “Dermophis donaldtrumpi” in recognition of the president’s position on climate change. The announcement came on the heels of a weekend agreement by climate negotiators in Poland on the rules for implementing the Paris pact, which Trump sees as counter to U.S. national interests.



A London-based sustainable building company added a mop of blond hair to an image of an amphibian in the same family as the Dermophis donaldtrumpi, which it named after Donald Trump. (Matthijs Kuijpers/EnviroBuild and Al Drago/Bloomberg)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2018/12/19/blind-worm-like-amphibian-that-buries-its-head-underground-has-been-named-after-donald-trump/?utm_term=.da47a0b454e2