‘Ugly As Hell’: Trump Revives 1 Of His Longest-Running Feuds

President Donald Trump on Sunday launched a new attack on an old target: renewable energy.

Trump, who has spent years complaining about wind and solar energy, bragged during a Fox News interview that he was bringing back coal, while cleaner forms of energy are on the outs.

And he said it’s because of artificial intelligence.

Trump said he was told the U.S. will need to double its electrical output to help the AI industry grow. Calling it a “national emergency,” Trump said he was willing to move rapidly to increase energy production. Under the plan, companies building AI infrastructure can also build their own electric utilities.

He said that it could involve nuclear, oil, gas, and coal.

“The reason we do coal is because, and I call it clean, beautiful coal, you can really do things with coal today that you couldn’t have done, but the beautiful thing about the coal, and the thing that I look at, you know who uses coal? China,” he said. “Fifty-nine plants they’re opening this year. Coal.”

He said it’s because coal is “very powerful.”

“So we opened up coal,” he said, adding he also wants “every form” of energy ― except for two.

“I don’t want windmills destroying our place,” he said. “I don’t want, you know, these solar things where they go for miles and they cover up a half a mountain that are ugly as hell, and by the way the panels are all made, and the windmills, they’re all made in China.”

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” making its way through Congress would dramatically roll back credits for renewable energy.

Trump has long attacked renewable energy, especially wind, and in 2019 claimed ― falsely ― that windmills cause cancer. Last year, he called windmills “big, ugly suckers” that are “rusting and rotting.”

“The wind, the wind, it sounds so wonderful,” he said. “The wind, the wind, the wind is, the wind is bullshit, I’ll tell you.”

His issues with wind may have begun nearly two decades ago, when an offshore wind farm was proposed near the land that would become his golf resort in Scotland.

He sued to block it, lost, and has held a grudge against wind and other forms of renewable energy since.