President Donald Trump was left "humiliated" this week, according to a report from The Daily Beast, as activists trolled one of his premier golf courses with structures he seems to hate above almost anything else: windmills.
According to the Monday report, Greenpeace activists erected six structures resembling wind turbines on the grounds of Trump's Turnberry Golf Club in South Ayrshire, Scotland, each roughly 10 feet in height. Alongside the mock windmills was a sign reading, "Choose Wind. Dump Trump."
"Donald Trump wants to keep us as lifetime members of his Gulf Club, where every time he starts an illegal war, bills go through the roof while his fossil fuel backers make billions,” Lily-Rose Ellis, a climate campaigner for Greenpeace UK, said in a statement about the stunt. "But we don’t need to stay stuck in his sand trap — the renewables Trump hates are the best insurance policy against the chaos he’s unleashed."
Trump's overt antipathy towards wind turbines is well-documented and seemingly stems from a genuine hatred for their appearance, after several were built off the coast of another one of his Scottish golf courses in Aberdeen, a hatred that has spurred incessant efforts to discredit their positive benefits. Throughout the years, Trump has repeatedly made false claims about turbines, including exaggerated claims about how much they kill local bird populations and wildly unfounded claims that they cause cancer.
"Stop the windmills! You are ruining your countries. I really mean it,“ Trump told reporters while on the tarmac at Glasgow’s Prestwick Airport during a visit to Scotland last July. “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."
As The Daily Beast noted, Trump launched an international campaign against wind turbines after several went up near his Aberdeen property, calling them "monsters." In 2019, the battle came to an end after a judge ruled against Trump, ordering that Trump International Golf Club Scotland pay the Scottish government’s legal bills. Scotland now generates more energy than it needs through renewables, selling the surplus to the rest of the U.K.
The Trump administration, meanwhile, has aggressively gone after renewable energy projects, especially wind energy. Recently, it offered the French energy firm, TotalEnergies, $1 billion to halt wind projects and redirect its focus to oil and natural gas in red states.
