During his first phone call with then-new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, President Donald Trump launched into a rambling monologue about wind turbines — which he calls windmills — that left British officials struggling to contain their laughter, according to an eyewitness.
Officials 'Barely Able to Contain Themselves'
Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer's chief of staff, told the BBC that Trump started by saying, “Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills.” McSweeney noted that Trump has made this point publicly many times before.
But then the president went further. “He started to say ‘the windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds,’” McSweeney recalled. At that point, officials in the room were “barely able to contain themselves because it was extremely funny,” he said. “But this was the first call between the prime minister and the president and everyone wanted to be professional but were struggling to hold it together.”
The Fat Foxes of Scotland
Trump then elaborated on the fate of the foxes. “And he went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat. And as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were because they were too fat,” McSweeney said. “They were these fat foxes walking around Scotland eating dead birds.”
While Starmer managed to keep a straight face — “He just absolutely contained himself,” McSweeney said — no one else in the room did. McSweeney added that Trump seemed to be trying to be funny, but his grudge against wind turbines is very real.
Trump's Long War on Wind Power
Trump has railed against windmills for years in speeches and interviews, and in 2019 even falsely claimed they cause cancer. His opposition appears to date back some two decades, when an offshore wind farm was proposed near the land that would become his golf resort in Scotland. He sued to block it but lost, and has since trashed wind power and other forms of renewable energy.
More recently, Trump has been paying a French company $1 billion in taxpayer funds to abandon two offshore wind leases, underscoring the depth of his animosity toward the technology.
