CNN’s resident fact-checker tore into Donald Trump for repeatedly asking Americans to “remember” things that never actually happened.
The 80-year-old president on Thursday trotted out a fake story he’s been telling for years about how people couldn’t watch his June 27, 2024, debate with Joe Biden because “the wind wasn’t blowing,” leading to a widespread TV blackout in areas that use wind power.
The story, however, is completely a figment of his imagination—and its underlying premise makes no sense, reporter Daniel Dale said Sunday.
A whopping 51 million people watched the debate on television alone—including in Texas, which leads the nation in wind power production.
“The president is making stuff up again,” Dale said.
Wind is used as part of a mix of power sources, and batteries store wind-generated power for periods when the wind is blowing.
So not only is the story itself “completely made up,” but the idea behind it is also “completely made up by the president of the United States,” he added.
The president has harbored an irrational hatred of wind turbines ever since the Scottish government approved a wind project off the coast of Aberdeen within sight of his golf course more than a decade ago.
For years, he has pushed bizarre theories about how wind turbines kill whales, cause cancer, and destroy property values, and has tried throughout his second term in office to block offshore wind projects.
But the great fake wind blackout of 2024 is not the only made-up event Trump has encouraged people to “remember.”
Last year, he reminded people to “remember” that he was at his golf club in Scotland the day of the Brexit vote and correctly predicted the outcome. In fact, he was there a day after the vote when the results had already come in, Dale said.
The president also has episodes of “fake history” that he has shared repeatedly throughout his terms in office.
One is a bogus story about President George Washington keeping two side-by-side desks in his study, one for his private business and one for the presidency.
Another is a repeated claim that 38,000 Americans died building the Panama Canal during the early 20th century. In fact, 5,600 people died total building the canal, more than 5,000 of whom were Black workers from the Caribbean who were poorly treated, Dale said.
“So, the president making up numbers, making up anecdotes, and making up things he’s asking people to remember even though he made them up,” Dale said.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
