President Donald Trump requested Americans on Thursday in the event that they remembered a large tv outage two years in the past.
That outage didn’t occur. As he has before, the president who’s keen on telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking folks to recall something he had made up.
This time, Trump’s fictional story was about wind vitality. He has for years railed towards it, tried to thwart it and made false claims about it – including a phony anecdote about how, in locations the place wind energy is used, folks can’t activate their TVs when the wind isn’t blowing.
That isn’t true; wind is used as a part of a mixture of electrical energy sources, not as the one supply, so the grid retains working and TVs keep on even when there is no such thing as a breeze. (Also, there are batteries that can retailer vitality from wind generators for deployment throughout low-wind durations.) But Trump has typically delivered the no-TV story with a comedic touch that has allowed it to skirt truth checks.
In his Thursday remarks on the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, he told it principally as if it had been an actual memory.
He denounced “the Green New Scam, where we were scammed.” Then he stated: “The whole country was – I wasn’t scammed. I got it right from the beginning; I got it from the first minute when I heard this crap. You know? They were saying wind was so wonderful, so wonderful, except you couldn’t watch your television. They wanted to watch the debate, Donald Trump against Sleepy Joe Biden. Nobody could watch it because the wind wasn’t blowing. Remember that? ‘Darling, we’d like to watch the debate tonight.’ ‘I’m sorry, the wind isn’t blowing.’”
Uh, no.
Tens of hundreds of thousands of Americans watched his June 2024 debate with then-President Joe Biden – more than 51 million on tv alone, in accordance to Nielsen estimates. The viewers, in fact, included folks within the state that produced by far the most wind-powered electrical energy in 2024 and nonetheless produces by far essentially the most at this time…Republican-dominated Texas, which can also be essentially the most populous state Trump gained.
Biden did promote the adoption of renewable vitality throughout his presidency, and he set a goal of the US having 100% “clean electricity” by 2035. But Congress never handed and Biden never signed the Green New Deal, a nonbinding congressional resolution proposed by progressive Democrats that stated the nation ought to embark on a 10-year push to meet all of its energy demand by “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy.” Wind was chargeable for about 10% of US web electrical energy era in 2024, in accordance to federal data.
Trump’s wind story wasn’t the one fictional story he informed on the Thursday occasion. He additionally claimed California has “brownouts and blackouts every weekend,” which is just not true; he has been making similar false claims about California for years.
A spokesperson for Gov. Gavin Newsom stated in a Friday e-mail that “there hasn’t been a rolling blackout in nearly six years in California” and that “California’s grid hasn’t had to call for any emergency conservation through the Flex Alert program since 2022, which is proof that the state’s investment in clean energy and battery storage is paying off.”
And Trump lamented, twice, that he will get “no credit” for the US having obtained “$19.2 trillion” in funding in simply his first 12 months again in workplace. He doesn’t get such credit score as a result of the US hasn’t really obtained wherever shut to $19.2 trillion in funding throughout this presidential time period, not to mention absorb that a lot through the first 12 months of the time period; as we’ve repeatedly explained, Trump’s determine is a fabrication even the White House can’t substantiate.