Donald Trump hasn’t had a great feel for how to respond to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He started by calling it “genius.” Then, days later, he called it a “Holocaust.” He’s bashed President Biden for being weak, but when asked what he would do differently, he said he couldn’t say.
The former president doesn’t seem to have anything coherent to add about how the conflict might end, either. When he was asked about what to expect going forward during a recent appearance on the podcast of the popular creator collective the Nelk Boys, Trump’s thoughts turned to … windmills.
“What do you see happening next, then?” Trump was asked. “It seems like the tensions are high. How does this all end? Is this going to be a long-term thing? How do you see this unfolding?”
“Well, and I said this a long time ago, we are playing right into their hands with the green energy,” Trump began. “The windmills. They don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes. Yet, the environmentalists love the windmills. I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills. I had them way down. The windmills are the most expensive energy you can have, and they don’t work. They last a period of 10 years and by the time they start rusting and rotting all over the place nobody ever takes them down. They just go onto the next piece of prairie or land and destroy that. It’s incredible.”
OMG I’m dying!!! On a UFC podcast today, Trump is asked how he sees the war in Ukraine playing out and he launches into a riff about windmills! pic.twitter.com/S2nV6hLIbP
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) March 10, 2022
Trump has indeed been preaching about windmills for years, using them as a stand-in for all green-energy initiatives. The arguments have always been the same. “They make noise, they’re intermittent, they kill your birds, they break down all the time, you have to replace them every ten years,” he said during a campaign rally in 2019. The only talking point he didn’t hit on during his rant on the Nelk Boys podcast — which, again, came in response to a question about how the war in Ukraine will end — was that windmills cause cancer, a ludicrous claim he made while speaking at a National Republican Congressional Committee dinner in 2019. “They say the noise causes cancer,” Trump said at the time.
Trump obsession with windmills can be traced back to the UK Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that the Trump Organization couldn’t block the construction of a wind farm Trump said would ruin the view from one of his golf courses in Scotland. The Trump Organization was ordered to pay Scotland’s legal bills, and the wind farm was erected in 2018.
