Great news, everyone. We finally have a simple, elegant metric for national failure, and it came straight from the Oval Office.
Speaking to reporters on Monday, President Trump was lamenting the sorry state of Europe — immigration, energy, the usual list — when he arrived at the real culprit.
“Any country with windmills is a loser,” he announced. You just have to look, he explained. If they have windmills, they’re a loser, because you lose money with windmills.
Beautiful. Clean. Falsifiable.
Let’s falsify it.
Running the Loser Index
If the presence of wind turbines is the tell, then somebody needs to gently walk the president to a window. The United States ranks second in the world in wind power capacity. Not fiftieth. Second.
The U.S. Wind Turbine Database — maintained by the U.S. Geological Survey, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the American Clean Power Association — counts 77,379 turbines spinning across 45 states, plus Guam and Puerto Rico.
77,000. In the country he runs.
By the Loser Index, that makes America the runner-up loser of planet Earth, and it makes the man in charge of it the president of Losertown.
He didn’t seem to notice.
He also didn’t seem to notice that the single biggest concentration of these steel monstrosities is in Texas, followed by Iowa and Oklahoma — states not typically described in his rally speeches as pits of failure.
🌬️ Somebody’s gonna have to tell Abbott.
China, the Even Bigger Loser
Trump has been running a companion bit for years: China builds the windmills but is far too clever to use them.
Back in January, in a room full of oil executives, he said the Chinese make them and sell them “to suckers like Europe” and, previously, to us.
He suggested that if you ask China how many wind farms it has, “nobody can find any.”
Psst. Human Printer lady? You might want to print this out for him. Unless he likes to look stupid, of course.
Here’s the trouble. China has so many wind farms that when this claim got a fresh airing at Davos, the Chinese government’s own information office published a public rebuttal with the receipts: first in the world in installed wind capacity for fifteen consecutive years, and roughly 600 gigawatts on the grid.
That is a genuinely remarkable thing to have accomplished.
Beijing normally has to work hard to get anyone to read its press releases.
This time the President of the United States handed them a layup, and they dunked on him in English.
In 2025 alone, China installed 120 gigawatts of new wind capacity — more, in one year, than the entire installed capacity of any nation on Earth except the United States.
Globally, wind hit 1,299 gigawatts across 138 countries.
So under the Loser Doctrine, China is the biggest loser in human history, we’re the silver medalist, and 136 other countries are on the podium behind us.
The only winners left are the handful of nations with no wind industry whatsoever, several of them are currently on fire.
The Origin Story is a Golf Course
You may be wondering how a metric this rigorous was developed. Peer review? A national laboratory?
No. Aberdeenshire.
The president’s war on wind traces back to a fight he lost over a small offshore wind farm built within eyeshot of his Scottish golf course more than a decade ago.
He sued.
He lost.
And the American energy grid has been paying the emotional price ever since.
A man saw eleven turbines from a tee box, and roughly fifteen years later the Department of Defense is freezing permits for over 100 onshore wind projects on vague “national security grounds.”
Where the Joke Stops Being Funny
We are in a country facing a looming power shortage, with electricity bills climbing and data centers eating the grid alive.
In that country, this administration agreed to pay developers nearly $2 billion in taxpayer money not to build permitted energy projects — Let me repeat that: Trump used $2 billion of our tax dollars to stop renewable energy projects.
DOGE? Elon? Waste, fraud, and abuse zealots? Helloooo?!
He paid them not to build them and to promise not to build others.
The Transportation Department clawed back another $679 million from a dozen projects across eleven states.
In December, Interior suspended five projects already under construction, citing classified reports it won’t show anyone.
Red states, listen. Regardless of how you feel about clean energy, these projects created thousands of high-paying jobs. Trump PAID someone to kill jobs.
One of the projects they killed, Vineyard Wind 1, was already delivering power to New England.
Senators Markey and Warren said shutting it down cost thousands of jobs and $3.7 billion in lost energy savings — more than half of those construction jobs were union.
Make America… great?… again.
The courts have not been happy about any of this.
A federal judge threw out the original executive order as unconstitutional, and the administration has lost essentially every case that made it to court.
So it stopped issuing orders and started writing checks instead. You cannot sue your way out of a bribe.
So yes: your bill goes up, the union hall empties out, the grid gets thinner, and a billion of your dollars goes to a company as a thank-you for building nothing.
Not because of a study. Not because of a cost analysis. Because a guy didn’t like the view from his golf course.
He’s right about some country losing money on windmills.
It’s us.
It’s just not for the reason he thinks. Loser.
