President Donald Trump asked Americans on Thursday if they remembered a massive television outage two years ago.
That outage didn’t happen. As he has before, the president who is fond of telling imaginary tales was explicitly asking people to recall something he had made up.
This time, Trump’s fictional story was about wind energy. He has for years railed against it, tried to thwart it and made false claims about it – including a phony anecdote about how, in places where wind power is used, people can’t turn on their TVs when the wind isn’t blowing.
That isn’t true; wind is used as part of a mix of electricity sources, not as the only source, so the grid keeps running and TVs stay on even when there is no breeze. (Also, there are batteries that can store energy from wind turbines for deployment during low-wind periods.) But Trump has often delivered the no-TV story with a comedic touch that has allowed it to skirt fact checks.
In his Thursday remarks at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, he told it mostly as if it were a real reminiscence.
