Irish Prime Minister Micheál Martin could barely keep a straight face as President Donald Trump launched a rant about one of his signature complaints: windmills.
In an Oval Office appearance to commemorate St. Patrick’s Day, Trump took a question from a British reporter on U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s hesitation to fully support Trump’s war in Iran with the U.K.’s entire military might.
The president said he was disappointed with Starmer before going on an unintelligible rant about energy and wind turbines, which he constantly refers to as windmills.
“Windmills all over the country, destroying those gorgeous Scottish fields,” Trump said, reiterating his longtime hatred.
The president then repeated his lie that China, by and large, the world’s largest producer and user of wind energy, doesn’t use windmills.
“Windmills, which don’t work, uh, they’re tremendously expensive, and the best testament to that is the windmills are made in China, but China doesn’t use them,” Trump complained.
“I am proudly telling you that we’re going to try and have no windmills built in the United States during my,” Trump said before teetering off.
“They’re very bad environmentally, they kill the birds, they’re unsightly, they make a lot of noise, and for some reason, the environmentalists love windmills,” he added.
Throughout the unprompted rant, Martin was seen trying to stifle a laugh as the president went on and on about wind energy.
Trump has long despised “windmills.” The president’s hatred is thought to largely stem from when his Scottish golf course, Trump International Golf Links in Aberdeen, was being constructed in 2006, and at the same time, Aberdeen Renewable Energy Group also started constructing a row of wind turbines, which could be seen in the view from the course.
“I want to see the ocean, I do not want to see windmills‚” he said at the time.
He fought the construction of the wind turbines at the time, but lost several times in court and was ordered to pay the Scottish government around $290,000 for its legal fees.
Since then, Trump has had repeated, public tantrums regarding wind energy.
In 2019, he claimed, without evidence, that the noise from wind turbines causes cancer, and more recently, in his 2024 run for office, claimed that they were making whales go “loco.” On his first day back in office for his second term, Trump signed an executive order that paused all federal wind permits.
He visited Scotland last year to check on his golf course, where he reignited his temper tantrum over wind turbines.
“Stop the windmills! You are ruining your countries. I really mean it,” he said in June. “It’s so sad. You fly over and you see the windmills all over the place ruining your beautiful fields and valleys and killing your birds, and—if they are stuck in the ocean—ruining your oceans.”
