President Donald Trump somehow answered a question about the highly charged issue of Irish reunification by ranting against “windmills” on Sunday, leaving his critics baffled by the dramatic pivot.
Trump waded into fraught territory on Saturday when he said he’d “love” to see a unified Ireland during a meeting with Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin in Dublin.
“It’s going to happen eventually,” Trump said. “It may as well happen now.”
On Sunday, a reporter asked Trump about British Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s position that there won’t be a referendum on the subject until it has the support of the majority.
“Everybody says that,” Trump said. “And then things happen.”
But then Trump took an abrupt turn, saying Burnham was going to resume North Sea drilling and would be “stopping the stupid windmills.”
Trump usually means wind turbines when he says “windmills” and has railed against them for decades.
Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty Images
“I hope no windmills,” Trump said. “If you have a windmill near your house, your house is practically valueless.”
He praised Ireland for having fewer windmills than Scotland.
“Here’s the good thing about a windmill: It can be taken down,” Trump said. “But you know what’s so bad and so pathetic? You can’t really bury them, they say the blades will cause all sorts of problems in the earth.”
Trump hates just about every form of renewable energy, but is especially bitter toward wind power. His anger goes back about two decades, to the construction of an offshore wind farm near his golf resort in Scotland. He complained it would spoil the view from his resort and sued to block the project.
He lost and has held a grudge ever since.
The president has attacked wind turbines as “ugly as hell,” claimed they are driving whales “crazy,” has said “the wind is bullshit,” and even insisted that windmills cause cancer.
Since returning to office, he’s halted work on wind projects, including one off the coast of Rhode Island that was 80% complete, and paid a French company $1 billion to abandon two offshore wind leases.
Trump’s critics called him out over his latest out-of-the-blue attack on wind power: