So Donald J. Quixote goes on his BFF Sean Hannity’s Fox News show on the anniversary of President Joe Biden’s first year in office—and goes tilting against windmills in a rant against wind power.
The news of the day was the letter from the House Jan. 6 committee to Princess Ivanka asking her to testify about her father’s actions or inaction surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection. In the letter, the House select committee cited text exchanges after the Capitol attack between Hannity and then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany.
In the texts, Hannity recaps a few points of a communications plan for responding to the attacks: “No more stolen election talk” and “Yes, impeachment and the 25th amendment are real and many people will quit.” And in another exchange, Hannity advised McEnany that it was “key” to keep Trump away from certain people, writing “No more crazy people.”
Did Trump go after Hannity for suggesting that he stop talking about the Big Lie? Of course not. Instead, Trump had windmills on his mind as he assessed President Biden’s first year in office.
Trump told Hannity:
"Stop with all of the windmills all over the place that are ruining the atmosphere. You look at what's happening to these beautiful prairies and plains and these gorgeous areas of our country where they have these rusting hulks put up all over the place where—that are noisy, they're killing the birds."
“I don’t get the environmentalists. And it’s a very expensive form, probably the most expensive form of energy. You look at what we had. You know, natural gas is very clean. They destroyed the coal miners, and you have clean coal and they use coal now for much more than just energy.”
Now throughout his maladministration, Trump went off on rants about windmills, making all sorts of false claims about wind power. He has claimed that windmills cause cancer, kill birds and prevent people from watching television when the wind is not blowing. Interestingly, the top three states as of 2020 in terms of producing wind power were all Republican-controlled: Texas, Iowa, and Oklahoma.
Much of Trump’s animus toward windmills probably stems from his multi-year legal battle with the Scottish government. He tried and failed to block an offshore wind farm from being built-in view of the Trump International Golf Links, Scotland, outside the city of Aberdeen.
In 2013, Trump sued the Scottish government to block the wind farm, He called it a “monstrous” project whose turbines would destroy the view of “perhaps the greatest golf course anywhere in the world,” according to The Washington Post.
And in a 2013 op-ed in the Scottish Sunday Mail, Trump referred to Scottish first minister Alex Salmond as “Mad Alex,” and declared he was “going to fight him for as long as it takes—to hell if I have to—and spend as much as it takes to block this useless and grotesque blot on our heritage.” Trump’s mother was from Scotland.
In the end the U.K. Supreme Court unanimously rejected Trump’s legal challenge in 2015. The Trump Organization had to pay $290,000 to the Scottish government to cover its legal costs. The wind farm opened in 2018. Trump’s Aberdeen golf course has been a steady money loser, and New York Attorney General Letitia James is now looking at “fraudulent” valuations of the property.
Trump’s windmill rant wasn’t the only odd moment on his rambling Thursday night interview with Hannity. Fox News looks for any excuse to pursue its meme that President Biden is suffering from memory lapses and even the onset of dementia. But Biden was on the mark during a marathon two-hour news conference on Wednesday.
Now take a look at how confused Trump got when Hannity made a metaphorical reference to walls, and after a brief pause, Trump responded by literally talking about his border wall.
As Raw Story reported:
Referring to President Joe Biden, Hannity said, “So, you keep banging your head against the wall — why would you expect a different result?”
Trump responded: "So, we would have had the wall completed in three weeks. It was largely completed. We did almost 500 miles of wall.”
And then Hannity, pushing the right-wing meme, asks Trump whether he believes President Biden is “struggling cognitively.”
Trump boasted that his White House doctor, Ronny Jackson, who’s now a congressman from Texas said he “aced” the cognitive test, “And I don’t think he ever saw anyone ace it.” If Jackson never saw anyone “ace” that test it could only be because he’s not a psychiatrist or psychologist and never administered the test to anyone before.
My wife is a psychologist and regularly administers the one-page MoCA (Montreal Cognitive Assessment) test when screening patients. She’s seen lots of people ace the test if they are not cognitively impaired.
I saw the musical Man of La Mancha starring Richard Kiley as Don Quixote on Broadway back in the late ‘60s, and the 1972 film musical starring Peter O’Toole. Don Quixote might have been diagnosed with a paranoid personality disorder, but Trump’s tilting at windmills is more harmful and reflects his narcissism and possibly other psychological impairments, such as an anti-social personality disorder, according to his niece, Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist.
No comments:
Post a Comment