U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks during the signing ceremony for an executive order on mail ballots, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., March 31, 2026. REUTERS Evan Vucci
Over the weekend, President Donald Trump was hit with a CNN fact check that did not go in his favor. While Trump is known for making grandiose, exaggerated claims, according to CNN, a series of stories he’d just told were “completely made up.”
Trump was delivering remarks at the headquarters of the Environmental Protection Agency when he veered off-topic to delve into one of his oft-discussed obsessions: his hatred of wind turbines. He began by denouncing “the Green New Scam, where we were scammed,” before saying, “The whole country was – I wasn’t scammed. I got it right from the beginning; I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. You know? They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn’t watch your television. They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. Remember that? ‘Darling, we’d like to watch the debate tonight.’ ‘I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.’”
The story, however, was entirely imaginary, and its underlying premise nonsensical, said CNN reporter Daniel Dale. In reality, a massive 51 million people watched the debate on television alone — including in Texas, the nation’s top producer of wind power.
“The president is making stuff up again,” Dale said. And as wind comes from a mix of power sources, with batteries storing wind-generated power for periods when the wind isn’t blowing, Dale noted that not only was the story itself “completely made up,” but the concept undergirding it was “completely made up by the President of the United States.”
According to the Daily Beast, “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.”
Trump made a number of other completely made-up claims at the event, asserting that “brownouts and blackouts every weekend,” which CNN described as “simply not true.” He also whined more than once that he gets “no credit” for the “$19.2 trillion” in investments the U.S. received during his first year back in office. According to CNN, “He doesn’t get such credit because the US hasn’t actually received anywhere close to $19.2 trillion in investment during this presidential term, let alone take in that much during the first year of the term; as we’ve repeatedly explained, Trump’s figure is a fabrication even the White House can’t substantiate.”
