Yesterday Trump was back on the campaign trail in New Hampshire and South Carolina, spewing his grievances the way a standup comedian might. And that means fact checking is back too. He already has the fact checkers as busy as George Santos does. Señor T lied his way through his address to the New Hampshire GOP annual meeting, reviving his greatest hits about how the 2020 election was stolen from him, how he’s so far ahead in the polls that no one else has a chance, how Hunter Biden’s laptop is the biggest scandal in history, how U.S. borders are open to people from prisons and mental institutions and how his criminal career wasn’t criminal all.
He also claimed “wind power will ‘destroy our planes and beautiful oceans and seas and everything else… The price of oil hits an all-time high, and that was the day [Biden] said, No drill, we’re not gonna drill. We’re going wind. Let’s kill all the birds. Let’s destroy our planes and beautiful oceans and seas and everything else.’ Trump said. It’s unclear what Trump believes wind turbines will do to planes.” Keeping up the lies, he told the eager Republican audience that “on top of it, we sell China millions and millions of barrels of cheap oil. We’re selling it to China. We demand windmills be built on our oceans. We demand they go in our prairies and our mountains and our plains only to realize that they’re killing all our birds at a level that if you go out hunting and you happen to shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail like for five years, right? They kill thousands of them with these windmills. Nothing happens… [Wind is] the most expensive and least reliable form of energy on our planet— extremely expensive. And the wind turbines are all made in China. Some are made in Germany, but most are made in China.”
Trump carries a longstanding personal grudge against windmills. He lost a legal battle against the Scottish government after he sued when the government installed an offshore wind farm within view of one of his golf courses, Trump International Scotland. After lengthy litigation, the Trump Organization was ordered in 2019 to pay the Scottish government $290,000 for its legal fees in the case.
This was not the only wild claim Trump made in his New Hampshire speech. He also said that before the U.S. left Afghanistan, the Taliban “never [fought] at night because they don’t have binoculars.” (He probably meant night vision goggles, though they did have access to those pre-2021.) And, Trump attacked the FBI’s investigation into classified documents he kept at Mar-a-Lago resort after his presidency, claiming the National Archives are a “radical left” institution.
His speech also contained his usual hate, including a transphobic rant and tirade against immigrants.
This morning, Aaron Zitner and Elisa Collins reported that “Rifts in the GOP between those who support Donald Trump’s false 2020 election fraud claims and those who want the party to move on from the former president have resurfaced in party leadership races in key states, with each side blaming the other for disappointing midterm results.” Meanwhile, on State of the Union today New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu predicted Trump would lose the GOP primary in his state. He said Trump’s event there yesterday was a bust. “The response we received was that he read his teleprompter, he stuck to the talking points. He’s not really bringing that fire, that energy, I think that a lot of folks saw it in ‘16. I think that in many ways it was a little disappointing to some folks.”
After New Hampshire, Trump flew down to South Carolina, where most elected officials avoided him. Gov. Henry McMaster, Lindsey Graham and and just two Congress members, Russell Fry and Joe Wilson, bothered to show up. There was also a small handful of state lawmakers, including House Speaker Murrell Smith, who went out of his way to emphasize that he was there in his official capacity as speaker not to endorse anyone.
On the way to Columbia, Trump attacked DeSantis. He claimed to the reporters on the plane that DeSantis and his team are “trying to rewrite history” regarding their Covid-19 pandemic response, and called the Florida governor “very disloyal,” noting again that he was the source of Santis’ success. “I chose him… There are Republican governors that did not close their states. Florida was closed for a long period of time… I had governors that decided not to close a thing and that was up to them.”