Trump’s first call with Starmer turned into windmill comedy

Trump’s windmills – A British witness says President Donald Trump entered his first phone call with then-new Prime Minister Keir Starmer by joking about “windmills” and bird-eating foxes—so sharply that officials struggled to stay professional. The laughter didn’t erase a much bi

For the officials in the room, the moment didn’t start as diplomacy. It started as a punch line.

During President Donald Trump’s first phone call with then-new Prime Minister Keir Starmer, British officials “barely able to contain themselves” with laughter, according to Morgan McSweeney, Starmer’s chief of staff. McSweeney told the BBC that Trump was “much funnier than I expected him to be.”

The laughter, he said, came fast after Trump pivoted to one of his most familiar targets. In that call, McSweeney recalled Trump bringing up “wind turbines”—but calling them “windmills.” McSweeney said Trump’s pitch was simple: “Look, Britain’s a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills.”

Then came the darkly comic chain of images, the kind that makes a meeting hard to steer back onto rails. McSweeney said Trump started laying out a story in which “the windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”

At that point, McSweeney described the room’s focus slipping. “At this point. the officials that were in the room were barely able to contain themselves because it was extremely funny. ” he said. He added that it was also the first call between a prime minister and the president. and everyone wanted to remain professional even as they struggled to hold it together.

The call only intensified. McSweeney said Trump went on to describe foxes becoming lazy after eating birds—then fat—until people no longer knew what kind of creature they were because they were too fat. In the most vivid detail, McSweeney said Trump portrayed “these fat foxes walking around Scotland eating dead birds.”.

Starmer, McSweeney said, managed to stay composed in the middle of it. “He just absolutely contained himself,” McSweeney said. “No one else in the room did.”

McSweeney said Trump was trying to be funny. But the humor didn’t mask something that has been consistent for years: the grudge is real.

Trump has long battled wind power, and he has attacked windmills repeatedly during speeches and rallies. In 2019, he falsely claimed that windmills cause cancer. The hostility. McSweeney’s account suggests. wasn’t just a one-off bit—it aligns with how Trump has talked about the issue publicly for a long time.

That animus has also carried real financial consequences. Trump has pushed back so hard against wind power that he is paying a French company $1 billion in taxpayer funds to abandon two offshore wind leases. The payment is part of a broader pattern that, according to the account, traces back roughly two decades.

The dispute goes back to when an offshore wind farm was proposed near the land that would eventually become Trump’s golf resort in Scotland. He sued to block the project, but lost—and after that, he “trashed wind power as well as other forms of renewable energy ever since.”

Those details matter because they help explain why a phone call could become a theater of laughter while the policy conflict behind it has always been anything but light.

The sequence is hard to miss: a president known for repeatedly returning to windmills in public suddenly steers a historic first call into the same territory. and the witness describes officials struggling to stay professional while Starmer holds his composure. The jokes. as McSweeney portrays them. land because they come from a theme Trump has been carrying for years—one that has moved from rhetoric into taxpayer-backed payments and long-running legal fights over wind power.

Trump Keir Starmer Morgan McSweeney windmills wind turbines offshore wind leases Scotland BBC renewable energy taxpayer funds French company 2019 windmills cause cancer claim