January 22, 2024 – Donald Trump has been talking a lot about donuts lately. Donuts, it seems, are threatened by renewable energy and depend on fossil fuels. Maybe because he’s heard that they’re cooked in oil? Trump’s knowledge of cooking is likely pretty minimal, given that it’s unlikely he’s ever been inside a kitchen.

And windmills are terrible, just terrible. Putting the two theories together, the idea seems to be that windmills are killing donuts.  Imagine the blades, chopping defenseless donuts into tiny crumbs. It is to weep.

So OK,  I’ve played this up just a tad. But Trump actually has been bringing up donuts an awful lot when he talks about energy policy.  Consider this: “If you make donuts, anything you make has to do—and when they ended our energy, we were energy-independent. Think of this.”

And who “ended our energy”?  Joe Biden with his clean energy policies. Which Trump says he’ll end in his “Day One dictatorship” after taking office: “We’ll close up the border and become energy-independent. Then we’re going to be energy-dominant.” At that point, he says, it will be “DRILL BABY, DRILL!” And on the donut side, no doubt, it will be “FRY, BABY, FRY!”

And then there are the windmills.  Trump hates windmills with a passion that is awesome to behold.  They reduce housing values by 75%. And you can practically see the tears in his eyes when he talks about the impact of windmills:

“And of course it’s like a graveyard for birds. If you love birds, you’d never want to walk under a windmill because it’s a very sad, sad sight. It’s like a cemetery. We put a little statue for the poor birds. It’s true. You know in California if you shoot a bald eagle, they put you in jail for five years. And yet the windmills, they wipe them all out. It’s true. They wipe them out. It’s terrible. “

And if that weren’t bad enough, there’s the cancer allegedly caused by the noise. And he says,  since wind is intermittent, you might sit down to watch TV but not be to see your favorite show because there’s no power.

Windmill cancer. No TV. And no donuts. No wonder he talks about American carnage.

On the other hand, when you think about it, a fat donut is just a zero with icing.

Dan Farber has written and taught on environmental and constitutional law as well as about contracts, jurisprudence and legislation. Currently at Berkeley Law, he is also a pioneer in the emerging field of Disaster Law, which examines legal issues related to society’s ability to deal effectively with the aftermath of catastrophes and the risk of future disasters.

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