Trump Is Once Again Back On His Bird Bulls**t

In an interview with Fox News this week, former President Donald Trump, a climate change denier and unabashed ally of planet-warming fossil fuels, furthered his already-long record of exaggerating the wind industry’s impact on birds.

But this time, he leaned into his purported concern that wind companies are killing eagles without punishment.

“If you shoot a bald eagle, or an eagle of any kind, they put you in jail for two years,” he told Fox News host Jesse Watters. “Go under a windmill, see how many eagles are under there. Nobody goes to jail.”

This was a remarkably rich talking point considering the fact that during his first term, Trump made it easier for the energy sector, including wind companies, to kill eagles and other migratory birds with impunity.

In late 2017, Daniel Jorjani, the top lawyer at Trump’s Department of the Interior and a longtime former adviser to fossil fuel moguls Charles and David Koch, issued a highly controversial legal opinion that effectively legalized all unintentional migratory bird deaths, including those caused by wind turbines, oil and gas operations, chemical spills and power lines. As long as a company or individual did not intend to kill birds, they were sheltered from prosecution.

The move broke with decades of legal precedent, effectively gutted the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act, and opened the door for gross negligence on the part of industry, as HuffPost reported at the time. Investigations into MBTA-protected bird deaths from industrial activities came to an immediate, screeching halt.

In 2020, a federal judge overturned Trump’s MBTA rollback. Yet in the waning days of Trump’s term, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a rule aimed at codifying Jorjani’s legal