With Donald Trump out of office, I would very much like to ignore his existence or, in an ideal dream world, get him Eternal-Sunshined out of our collective memory entirely. But every so often we do have to mention him again—either because it’s apparent he still has a distressing hold on much of the Republican Party and its entire trajectory, or because sometimes he does something so excessively embarrassing that it really is worth the laugh.
Definitely file this one under “excessively laughable.” Trump recently appeared on a podcast called “Full Send,” hosted by a couple of guys who make YouTube prank videos known as the Nelk Boys. Off to a great start already.
At one point in the interview, one of the Nelk Boys asked Trump how he sees the Russian invasion of Ukraine “unfolding” and whether he thinks “this going to be a long-term thing.”
Trump responded by ranting about one of his biggest foes: windmills.
“Well, and I said this a long time ago, if this happens, we are playing right into their hands. Green energy. The windmills don’t work. They’re too expensive. They kill all the birds. They ruin your landscapes,” Trump replied.
“And yet the environmentalists love the windmills,” he continued. And I’ve been preaching this for years. The windmills―and I had them way down―but the windmills are the most expensive energy you can have. And they don’t work.”
Trump has been rambling about windmills for years. He’s said they cause cancer (they don’t), that they kill bald eagles (grossly exaggerated), and that they don’t work (they do). His claim that wind energy is ineffective is rooted in the belief that it only works when the wind is blowing—similar to a persistent misconception about solar energy.
“If Hillary got in,” he said during a rally in 2019, “you’d be doing wind. Windmills. Weeeee. And if it doesn’t blow, you can forget about television for that night. ‘Darling, I want to watch television.’ ‘I’m sorry! The wind isn’t blowing.’ I know a lot about wind.”
Sure.
Trump has been taking up the Don Quixote mantle and trying to fight windmills for a long time so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s still on it, even now. And it’s very unsurprising that he’s trying to tie American windmills to the situation in Ukraine. There’s a conspiracy theory floating around both among internet randos and conservative media, falsely claiming that—depending on how deep into the conspiracy you go—Green New Deal proponents are either fully behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine or at least exacerbating and enjoying it. Both are callous and unhinged but wholly unsurprising given how politicized issues of renewable energy have become in recent years.
Hell, back in the mid-aughts after George W. Bush started multiple wars in the Middle East, even he advocated not just for a reduction in dependence on foreign oil but an investment in alternative energy sources. But the issue is so politicized that Joe Biden wouldn’t even mention it when laying out America’s plan for responding to Russian aggression.
So when I said that the reasons we sometimes still check in with Trump’s ramblings are because they’re either worth a laugh or they’re still influencing the current political landscape, I guess this one was actually a bit of both.
(via: HuffPost, image: Anna Jiménez Calaf on Unsplash)
Published: Mar 10, 2022 02:07 pm