Trump says he's 'never seen a wind farm in China' - and gets instantly fact-checked

It’s clear that US president Donald Trump isn’t a fan of windmills, given he described them as “garbage” at the start of the year and claimed turbines off the Massachusetts coast are “driving the whales crazy”, and now, he’s made the outlandish claim that China – a world leader in wind energy – doesn’t have any wind turbines at all.

Addressing a crowd outside the White House on Friday (4 July), the US president said: “China’s right now building 68 coal-generating plants, and we’re putting up wind … It does not work, aside from ruining our fields and our valleys and killing all the birds, being very weak and very expensive – all made in China.”

Commenting on “all the windmills that China sends us”, he then went on to claim: “I have never seen a wind farm in China. Why is that?”

Well, the reality is that they are there, because the country is described as the “global renewable energy leader” due to it hosting “nearly half of the world’s total operating wind and solar capacity” – per a 2023 report from the non-profit research organisation, Global Energy Monitor.

The same report notes at the time of its publication in June that year, the combined onshore and offshore wind capacity of China had doubled from what it was in 2017, surpassing 310 gigawatts.

And according to the energy think tank Ember, China accounted for more than half of the global increase in both wind and solar power last year.

Thankfully, Twitter/X users were soon on hand to fact-check the president’s remarks, with BBC Verify journalist Shayan Sardarizadeh pointing out that Chinese wind farms “regularly generate more energy every month than all of Europe and north America combined”:

James Surowiecki, a writer for The Atlantic, claimed Trump has never seen a wind farm in China due to him being “an incurious narcissist”, adding that the country has the largest onshore wind farm in Gansu with 7,000 wind turbines:

Others, though, were more brutal in their responses, with political commentator @JoJoFromJerz branding the Republican “endlessly f****** stupid”:

And another joked that Trump “knows a lot about breaking wind”:

Trump wasn’t the only one to make the bizarre claim about the lack of wind farms in China this week, as Republican congressman Tim Burchett told Fox News on Saturday (5 July) the president has said to him “there are no windmills” in the country.

Cuts to funding for solar and wind energy were contained in the president's One Big Beautiful Bill, which passed through Congress this week.

Why not read…

• Donald Trump's hilariously awkward moment while waiting for flyover
• Trump’s most ‘hateful’ comments yet make him 'unfit’ to be President

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