A nearby offshore wind farm was already planned when Donald Trump purchased coastal land in northern Scotland to develop the Trump International Golf Links—a project he envisioned as an homage to his Scottish-American mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump.
“I am not thrilled. I want to see the ocean; I do not want to see windmills,” Trump told BBC News in May 2006. It was the first-known example of Trump’s years-long war against wind power.
It took another five years for the Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm to initiate permitting and, in 2012 as the golf course was nearing its opening, Trump launched an all-out media and legal assault against the wind project—a campaign that proved unsuccessful. “Tourism will suffer and the beauty of your country is in jeopardy,” Trump warned in a 2012 advertisement.
Trump wrote in a 2013 Daily Mail article that he would fight “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.” By the time he was first running for president in 2015, Trump had tweeted negatively about wind or “windmills” more than 130 times.
Much to Trump’s chagrin, the Scottish wind farm opened in 2018. But he’s carried that fight much more aggressively in his second term as U.S. president.
