Obese foxes and wind turbines: This was Trump’s first call with Starmer
The bizarre story revealed by Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff, according to analysts, summarizes the diplomatic style of the Trump era.
Audio: https://clyp.it/qcs5j3ho
Julio A. López, Editor-in-Chief .– With Keir Starmer on the verge of resigning as British prime minister, after concluding his final international tour and preparing to deliver his resignation letter to the King, his former chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, decided to reveal an anecdote that had remained hidden until now: the details of the first phone call between Starmer and Donald Trump, shortly after the Republican took office as president of the United States.
“Wind turbines are killing your birds”
According to McSweeney’s account on the BBC, Trump began explaining to the newly appointed British prime minister that wind turbines were killing birds. “They fall dead at the feet of the wind turbines, before being eaten by foxes,” the U.S. president allegedly said, while all the cabinet members present in the room — according to the account — tried to remain serious, without entirely succeeding.
But Trump did not stop there. He continued explaining that, “from eating so many birds without making the slightest effort, Scottish foxes have become lazy and fat,” to the point that “they had become so overweight that people no longer even knew what species they belonged to.” His conclusion: “Obese foxes are roaming around Scotland, eating dead birds. That is a problem.”
The first call between a president and a prime minister
According to McSweeney, this was the first conversation between the U.S. president and the British prime minister after Trump’s inauguration, and the president used the opportunity to ask Starmer to take specific measures, such as banning offshore wind turbines off the coast of Aberdeen, “so that Scots could continue recognizing their foxes.”
An obsession with personal roots
This was not the first time that the owner of the Turnberry golf course had publicly complained about the consequences of wind farms in Scotland. His opposition to wind turbines dates back to an offshore wind project near his other golf course in Aberdeen, against which he filed a legal challenge — and lost — before becoming president of the United States. The issue is so sensitive for him that he even mentioned it during his speech before the United Nations General Assembly.
A symbol of the end of a political era
The revelation comes at a particularly symbolic moment for British politics: Starmer is preparing to leave office after the collapse of support among Labor lawmakers, worsened by disastrous local election results. The United Kingdom’s Parliament is expected to soon appoint Andy Burnham, until recently the mayor of Greater Manchester, as its seventh prime minister in just ten years — a reflection of the political turbulence the country has experienced since the 2016 Brexit referendum. Trump has already described Burnham as “extremely liberal,” in another example of the tensions that have marked his relationship with London on issues such as energy, immigration, and foreign policy.
The legacy of an anecdote
As often happens with Trump’s controversial remarks, the fox story might appear, at first glance, to be just another entry in the president’s extraordinary collection of surreal moments. But this time, the combination of wind turbines, dead birds, and obese foxes taking center stage in the first official call between two historic allies has captured public attention as an unintended metaphor: that of a transatlantic relationship that, somewhere between the absurd and the real, continues moving — although with increasingly less grace — to the rhythm set by the White House.
