WHEN PIGS FLY: Six Degrees of Trump and Bacon

Former President Donald Trump. (photo: Emily Elconin/Getty)

Following the former president’s thought process can be a challenge.

David A. Graham / The Atlantic 01 September 24

Donald Trump frequently warns that wind turbines are killing birds. Last night in Wisconsin, he raised a new and opposite concern: They’re leading to fewer hogs being killed.

At a town-hall event, a young man asked the former president about the cost of meat, and he replied with a meandering answer that somehow connected wind farms to a decrease in bacon consumption. As with a lot of Trump quotations, you have to read or watch it at full length to even attempt to follow it.

“Groceries, food has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before. We’ve never seen anything like it—50, 60, 70 percent,” he said. “You take a look at bacon and some of these products and some people don’t eat bacon anymore. We are going to get the energy prices down. When we get energy down, you know, this was caused by their horrible energy—wind, they want wind all over the place. But when it doesn’t blow we have a little problem. This was caused by energy. This was really caused by energy, and also their unbelievable spending. They are spending us out of wealth, actually, they’re taking our wealth away, but it was caused by energy.”

Once you break it down into component parts, it’s not quite as erratic, but it’s still nonsensical. Trump is saying that the Biden administration has pushed for an expansion of wind power. That has, in his view, driven inflation, which has made grocery prices higher and forced cost-conscious shoppers to cut down on eating bacon.

That’s somewhat coherent, as a theory. The problem is that nearly none of it is true.

Here’s what’s right: Biden has pushed to expand wind power. In fact, U.S. production of every energy category except coal is at a record high. Bacon prices have also risen since the start of the Biden administration, part of broader inflation over the past few years.

But little evidence connects these things. Greater wind production should drive down overall energy costs—higher gasoline prices, which consumers track closely, notwithstanding. (Trump is right that turbines don’t turn when the wind doesn’t blow, though other energy sources continue to exist.) Biden’s big push for wind came in the Inflation Reduction Act, and although that law was improperly (and cynically) named, it also doesn’t seem to have produced inflation. In particular, bacon prices are lower than they were when it was passed.

Who knows where Trump came up with the bacon example, which he has mentioned in the context of inflation before. He offers no specifics, and it has the ring of his dubious “sir” stories. Economists have observed that bacon is sufficiently beloved that demand for it remains fairly stable, even when prices rise. Grocery prices have risen nowhere near 50 percent overall.

(One irony is that many environmentalists who back renewable energy might well cheer if wind power did produce a reduction in bacon consumption. Meat production, and especially the massive farms that produce much of the pork that Americans consume, is dirty and highly polluting.)

Trump’s riff is an example of the remarkably convoluted way that he phrases many statements. You can usually more or less follow where he’s going, but figuring out the details requires painstaking parsing—especially when the underlying claims are off base. For a man who hates wind power so much, Trump sure produces a lot of hot air.

Which blows more hot air, windmills or Trump?  If we could just harness the exhalations of the old blowhard, we might have another renewable source of wind energy.