At one point during his remarks to the National Republican Congressional Committee last night, Donald Trump complained, “Someone’s going to leak this whole damn speech to the media.” The remarks were being broadcast live by C-SPAN at the time.
That was, alas, not the strangest part of the president’s speech.
In a speech tonight to House Republicans, Trump claimed that wind turbines cause cancer.
“They say the noise causes cancer,” the president of the United States asserted.
Wind turbines do not cause cancer. Some people blame the noise for causing a variety of other health ailments, but these charges have zero scientific validity. Cancer is not caused by noises of any kind.
This comes on the heels of related remarks the president made last week, when he argued at a campaign rally that homes powered by wind can’t watch television when the skies are calm. (This is not how any of this works.)
Trump added that the audience should trust that he knows what he’s talking about. “I know a lot about wind,” the Republican said. “I know a lot about wind.”
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say Trump does not, in fact, know a lot about wind. I am curious, though, why the president is so hostile toward wind power. Ordinarily, he directs this kind of antagonism toward those who’ve slighted him in some way, but since it’s unlikely a turbine hurt Trump’s feelings, there’s probably an alternative explanation. Does this relate to his struggling Scottish golf resort? Is the president really this opposed to any kind of clean-energy alternatives that threatens the coal industry? Update: It looks like Trump has peddled misinformation about wind power for quite a while.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past." Recommended
