As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had.
Donald Trump has all sorts of odd grievances. He’s complained about low water pressure and toilets, magnetic elevators, a lack of Christmas cheer in advertisements, tiny windows, tiny fish, Abraham Lincoln’s negotiation skills, “the world” generally, and more. But perhaps his favorite thing to hate? Wind turbines.
In more than 100 social media posts over the last 12 years, he’s claimed that wind turbines are “ugly” and “disgusting looking,” “inefficient,” “unreliable,” “noisy,” “neighborhood-destroying,” “bird-killing” “monstrosities” that “cause tremendous damage to their local ecosystems.” (It’s true wind turbines kill birds—but not nearly as many as cars, buildings, and cats.) It’s a weirdly specific vendetta: It’s not as if Trump has some sort of personal, financial stake in blocking this one form of renewable energy. (Oh wait, he does.)
But as president, Trump went full wind-spiracy. At a Republican fundraiser in 2019, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer. “If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value,” he said. “And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one, okay?”
Following the event, several outlets fact-checked the president. For one, there’s no reason to think wind turbines would cause a decrease in property value anywhere near 75 percent. As FactCheck.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan fact-checking organization, reported at the time, most studies on the issue “indicate small or no changes to property values.”
And, critically, there is no known link between wind turbines and cancer. The American Cancer Society said at the time it was “unaware of any credible evidence linking the noise from windmills to cancer.” Nor is there any reason to think so, according to FactCheck.org:
Cancer, or what scientists think of as uncontrolled cell growth, is at heart a genetic disease because it starts when a cell has or acquires a mutation in its DNA that allows it to grow unchecked, as the National Cancer Institute explains…
Sound waves, however, aren’t thought to mutate DNA or to cause cancer in any other way. In fact, some sound waves help diagnose cancer, and they might even fight off the disease, researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research outside London have found.
The only plausible way wind turbines might contribute to even a small amount of cancer risk is by increasing stress or disrupting sleep. But it hasn’t yet been demonstrated that those problems do contribute to cancer risk, or that they are caused by turbine noise. Trump’s claim is baseless.
Trump’s wind tales continued after his time in office. Last year, Trump blamed wind power for rising energy costs (wind is the cheapest source of new energy in the country) and said wind turbines have made whales go “crazy” and die. (Just to be clear—there is no evidence of this.)
“They are washing up ashore,” he said, adding, “You wouldn’t see that once a year—now they are coming up on a weekly basis. The windmills are driving them crazy. They are driving the whales, I think, a little batty.”
