International leaders try and fail to hold back laughter at Donald Trump: top aide
5h
U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on October 13, 2025. REUTERS/Suzanne Plunkett/Pool
The laughter was hard to contain during a phone call between the British and the United States, a top British aide told the BBC
Outgoing Prime Minister Keir Starmer's chief of staff Morgan McSweeney is speaking out about some of the strange things he witnessed in his two years working for the U.K. government, a Daily Beast report on Friday said. One of those things left Starmer fighting to keep a straight face.
It was among his first calls with world leaders and the first time he spoke with U.S. President Donald Trump. There were two major topics of conversation for him that were so absurd that all Starmer could do was laugh.
The first comments were about "fat foxes," but the more important ones involved Trump's oldest grudge.
“So the first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills,” McSweeney said.
Since being in a fight with Scotland over an offshore wind farm, Trump has fought tooth and nail to eliminate windmills wherever he can.
“Then he started saying, ‘The windmills are killing your birds. The birds are falling around the windmills, and the foxes are eating those birds,’” McSweeney recalled Trump telling Starmer.
Trump then said that the foxes have become fat and lazy because the dead birds make it easier to hunt. The foxes have grown so fat that “people no longer knew what kind of creature they were because they were too fat.”
“At that point, the officials in the room were barely able to contain themselves because it was so funny,” McSweeney said. He added that those in the room tried so hard to be "professional," but it was a heavy lift.
"While wind turbines do result in some bird fatalities, studies consistently show they kill far fewer birds per unit of electricity generated than fossil fuel energy sources, which Trump has repeatedly recommended Britain should rely on instead," said the Daily Beast.
The highest killer of birds is cats.
The U.K has been unable to uncover any empirical evidence that foxes are growing fatter.
“We thought, ‘This is going to be so, so very, very different,’” said McSweeney about the U.K. relationship with Trump.
Trump broke the news about Starmer's resignation before it was announced publicly. Trump told The Washington Post that he never spoke to Starmer and that he just made an educated guess about the prime minister's next moves.