U.S. President Donald Trump asked Americans on Thursday if they remembered a massive television outage two years ago. That outage didn’t happen. As he has before, the president who is fond of telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking people to recall something he had made up. This time, Trump’s fictional story was about wind energy. He has for years railed against it, tried to thwart it and made false claims about it – including a phony anecdote about how, in places where wind power is used, people can’t turn on their TVs when the wind isn’t blowing. That isn’t true; wind is used as part of a mix of electricity sources, not as the only source, so the grid keeps running and TVs stay on even when there is no breeze. (Also, there are batteries that can store energy from wind turbines for deployment during low-wind periods.) But Trump has often delivered the no-TV story with a comedic touch that has allowed it to skirt fact checks. In his Thursday remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, he told it mostly as if it were a real reminiscence. He denounced “the Green New Scam, where we were scammed.” Then he said: “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.’” Uh, no. Tens of millions of Americans watched his June 2024 debate with then-President Joe Biden – more than 51 million on television alone, according to Nielsen estimates. The viewers, of course, included people in the state that produced by far the most wind-powered electricity in 2024 and still produces by far the most today…Republican-dominated Texas, which is also the most populous state Trump won. Biden did promote the adoption of renewable energy during his presidency, and he set a goal of the U.S. having 100 per cent “clean electricity” by 2035. But Congress never passed and Biden never signed the Green New Deal, a nonbinding congressional resolution proposed by progressive Democrats that said the country should embark on a 10-year push to meet all of its power demand through “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy.” Wind was responsible for about 10 per cent of U.S. net electricity generation in 2024, according to federal data. Trump told other false tales, too Trump’s wind story wasn’t the only fictional tale he told at the Thursday event. He also claimed California has “brownouts and blackouts every weekend,” which is simply not true; he has been making similar false claims about California for years. A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a Friday email that “there hasn’t been a rolling blackout in nearly six years in California” and that “California’s grid hasn’t had to call for any emergency conservation through the Flex Alert program since 2022, which is proof that the state’s investment in clean energy and battery storage is paying off.” And Trump lamented, twice, that he gets “no credit” for the U.S. having received “$19.2 trillion” in investment in just his first 12 months back in office. He doesn’t get such credit because the US hasn’t actually received anywhere close to US$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. Analysis by Daniel Dale
