The high cost of power bills is shaping up to be a political issue in this year's midterm elections. But when it comes to generating electricity, President Trump is picking winners and losers. He's pushing companies to keep aging coal-powered plants online.
And then there's wind energy, which Trump hates.
"I can proudly say, Doug, that we have not approved one windmill since I've been in office. And we're going to keep it that way. My goal is to not let any windmill be built. They're losers," Trump said to his interior secretary, Doug Burgum, at a recent White House event.
At Trump's urging, Burgum has actively worked to thwart wind projects on land and offshore.
On Monday, Burgam's Interior Department announced it will pay a French energy company, TotalEnergies, nearly $1 billion to stop plans to build two wind farms off the coasts of New York and North Carolina. Instead, TotalEnergies will take the money it had paid during the Biden administration for federal offshore land leases and reinvest some of it into a liquefied natural gas plant in Texas. TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné described the agreement to forfeit its leases for U.S. offshore wind farms as "innovative."
The president, meanwhile, repeats his distaste for wind power often and usually without any prompting at all, like he did last week in the Oval Office with the prime minister of Ireland.
"They're very bad environmentally; they kill the birds; they're unsightly; they make a lot of noise," Trump said.
Turbine collisions do kill birds, though far fewer than outdoor cats and building collisions do, according to the National Audubon Society. But for Trump, this really isn't about science. Attacking wind energy is more of a passion project.
And in this second Trump term, it is the policy of the U.S. government. Long-planned projects have stalled, awaiting federal approvals that aren't coming. And the administration took the highly unusual step of pausing construction for five offshore wind power projects that were already being built off the East Coast by Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York and Virginia.
"This is unprecedented, and no one saw this coming," said Kit Kennedy, managing director of the power unit at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group.
"These are projects that are creating tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. They represent billions and billions of dollars of investment and were near completion when these stop-work orders come down," Kennedy said.
The companies building the projects sued, and judges have rejected the administration's arguments. With preliminary injunctions in place, construction has resumed, and one project is already delivering power.
But Trump and his administration are pushing ahead. White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers says that former President Joe Biden was the one picking favorites and that Trump's "energy dominance agenda is unleashing reliable, affordable, secure energy sources to meet growing demands."
The president's very strong feelings about wind turbines date back at least to 2012.
"My name is Donald Trump, and I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak. It is a very, very serious problem that we are addressing. In my opinion, it is one of the most serious problems that Scotland will have or has had," Trump said back then, testifying before the Scottish Parliament.
And that very, very serious problem was an offshore wind farm near his Aberdeen golf course.
"The members are going absolutely crazy. I said, 'And you haven't seen the worst. Wait until you turn it on and you hear the noise,'" Trump said at the time, adding: "They were blindsided."
His feelings haven't changed, but his power to affect U.S. policy has.
"It would be funny if it wasn't affecting so many people, but [he's] really like a Don Quixote tilting at windmills," said Andrew Reagan, president of Clean Energy for America, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable clean energy. "He will never stop this industry. He's only going to slow it down in America and make us less competitive than our foreign rivals."
The five offshore East Coast wind projects, when completed, will produce enough energy to power 2.5 million homes. And energy demand keeps rising, because of data centers, AI, cryptocurrency and electric vehicles.
"All of these things require a tremendous amount of power, which is why it seems a little odd that the administration is taking steps today to curb wind," said Neil Chatterjee, who was a commissioner and chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission during the first Trump term and now works for a clean energy finance company called Palmetto.
He said the demand for energy is only increasing and Trump's effort to stop projects that are already started is problematic.
"To freeze that midstream sets a really, really bad precedent that can be used by future administrations to stop fossil fuel projects," said Chatterjee.
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