President Donald Trump had British officials “barely able to contain themselves” with laughter during his first phone call with then-new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, according to one witness.
“He’s much funnier than I expected him to be,” Morgan McSweeney, who was Starmer’s chief of staff, told the BBC.
During that first phone call, Trump brought up one of his famous sore spots: wind turbines or, as the president calls them, windmills.
“He started saying, ‘Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills,’” McSweeney recalled. “Fine. He was making his point; he’s made that publicly enough times.”
Trump has indeed attacked windmills for years during speeches and rallies.
“He started to say, ‘The windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds,’” McSweeney said.
Trump’s comment made the conversation difficult for those listening in.
“At this point, the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves because it was extremely funny,” he said. “But this was the first call between the prime minister and the president, and everyone wanted to be professional, but were struggling to hold it together.”
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But then it got even weirder.
“And he went on to say that as the foxes ate so many birds and became lazy, they became fat. And as they became so fat, people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were because they were too fat,” he said. “They were these fat foxes walking around Scotland eating dead birds.”
McSweeney said Starmer managed to avoid laughing.
“He just absolutely contained himself,” he said. “No one else in the room did.”
Trump, he added, was trying to be funny.
However, the president’s grudge against windmills is very, very real.
Trump has railed against them in speeches and during interviews, and in 2019 even falsely claimed that windmills cause cancer. He hates windmills so much that he’s paying a French company $1 billion in taxpayer funds to abandon two offshore wind leases.
His beef seems to go back some two decades, when an offshore wind farm was proposed near the land that would become his golf resort in Scotland. He sued to block it, but lost ― and has trashed wind power as well as other forms of renewable energy ever since.
“Officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves”
Morgan McSweeney gives @bbcnickrobinson an insight into US President Donald Trump’s first phone call with Keir Starmer
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