President Donald Trump was apparently too blinded by his hatred of windmills to recognize the glaring error in his social media post about bald eagles.
On Tuesday, Trump, 79, wrote on Truth Social that windmills “are killing all of our beautiful bald eagles!” The photograph he attached to his post showed a dead bird with a windmill in the background. But the bird was a falcon, the windmill was in Israel, and the raptor’s unfortunate demise occurred at least eight years ago.
California Governor Gavin Newsom promptly mocked the president.
“Dozy Don doesn’t know what America’s bird looks like???” his press team wrote on X.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
Despite the image in Trump’s post being off-base, the substance of what he wrote has merit.
Windmills obviously do kill birds—an estimated 700,000 to 1 million per year, according to the American Bird Conservancy (ABC). How many of those are bald eagles is hard to say. But ABC explains that “collision with human-made structures such as poorly sited towers, powerlines, and wind turbines is one of the leading causes of Bald Eagle mortality.”
Fortunately, the bald eagle population has risen in the past few decades after the species had been perilously close to extinction, in part due to the pesticide DDT. The ABC says it continues to push the Environmental Protection Agency to hold pesticide manufacturers—and those of other toxins—in check.
Under Trump, however, the EPA doesn’t seem to be too receptive to hearing the ABC’s concerns.
In July, the agency announced it was closing its office of research and development, which, among other things, measures the harmful effects of toxic chemicals and water pollution.
The next month, EPA head Lee Zeldin said the agency would be reversing its 2009 finding that greenhouse gas emissions pose a threat to human health.
As of September, the Trump administration had granted more than 160 pollution-producing facilities an exemption to certain Clean Air Act standards, according to the Environmental Defense Fund.
Also this summer, the administration was widely criticized for considering allowing cancer-causing asbestos in construction again, after Joe Biden had upgraded a partial ban to a full ban.
And as for the Endangered Species Act, the 1973 law that benefited the bald eagle, the alligator, and the grizzly bear: the Trump administration last month proposed four new rules to weaken it in favor of oil drilling, logging, and mining.
Trump’s first term saw more of the same.
Back then, his EPA declined to ban the toxic insecticide chlorpyrifos, which was marketed as a DDT replacement, in food. Under Biden, the agency was finally able to do it.
In 2019, Trump also gutted the Endangered Species Act in a similar way he’s aiming to do now. Biden, again, reversed those changes.
Trump has rejected the scientific consensus on climate change, claiming it’s a “con job.”
The post Trump Trolled for Bird-Brained Error in Anti-Windmill Post appeared first on The Daily Beast.
