Politics
Trump Has Signed an Executive Order to Remove the Rainbow From America's Atmosphere Because It Looks Too Gay
By BSN Staff, . BSN Network. Satire.
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- President Trump signed an executive order in the Oval Office on Monday directing the removal of the rainbow from the atmosphere of the United States, citing what the order describes as "a persistent and unauthorized aesthetic" over American skies.
The order, Executive Order 14991, instructs the Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to "identify, catalogue and eliminate" instances of the phenomenon within the continental United States, with a compliance deadline of 1 January. Hawaii has been granted a provisional exemption pending review.
"It is a beautiful country, the most beautiful, and we are going to keep it that way," the president said at the signing. "But every time it rains, you get this thing in the sky. Everybody sees it. People are asking about it."
Pressed on what exactly the administration objects to, a senior official said the president had found the current arrangement "a little much."
NOAA scientists have advised that the rainbow is not an object and cannot be removed, being the visible result of sunlight refracting through suspended water droplets, a process the agency described in its response as "approximately as cancellable as arithmetic." The effect, it noted, will continue to occur whether or not anyone is present to see it.
The order anticipates this. Section 4 directs agencies to pursue removal "by any administratively available means," and a working group convened at Interior this week to examine whether the effect can be addressed at the level of the water droplet, the sunlight, or the observer. Asked which of the three it considered most promising, a spokesman said the group was "early in its work."
Staff at the National Weather Service have been instructed to continue reporting conditions normally.
"We put out a forecast. Sometimes it rains and the sun is out at the same time," said a duty forecaster in Sterling, Virginia, who asked not to be named because he had not been cleared to discuss refraction. "I am not sure what they want me to do about that."
Enforcement remains unclear. The order creates no penalty for the appearance of a rainbow and names no responsible party, which legal analysts noted is unusual even by the standards of the current term.
"There is no defendant," said Georgetown constitutional scholar Marta Vey. "You cannot serve papers on the sky. I have read it four times and the sky is the only thing in the document that has done anything wrong."
This is satire. The events and quotes are invented and none of it is real news.