Donald Trump has made plenty of outlandish claims about energy and the environment, often drawing on his perspective as a golf course owner and climate change denier.
Throughout his political career, the former president has frequently insisted windmills are unsightly menaces that “kill all the birds.” He once called for former Vice President Al Gore to be stripped of his Nobel Peace Prize because it happened to get cold outside. Not content to merely call climate change a hoax, Trump has claimed it was invented by the Chinese government.
But in his third presidential bid, Trump appears to have found a new environmental obsession: on at least eight occasions since May, he has publicly claimed the Biden administration’s climate policies threaten, of all things, donuts.
ADVERTISEMENT
“When you have a donut shop or a food shop or a dress shop, you need heat, you need whatever, you need everything,” Trump said at a rally in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, last month. “You need trucks to deliver your product. Energy is so big, so important.”
The recurring theme with Trump’s riffs on donuts is that they are only possible through fossil fuels.
“If you make donuts,” Trump said in an interview on Real America’s Voice in October, “anything you make has to do—and when they ended our energy, we were energy-independent. Think of this.”
During an August interview with his former economic adviser Larry Kudlow on Fox Business Network, Trump gave another ode to the pairing of fossil fuels and donuts. He told Kudlow fossil fuels are “so big, it’s like all-encompassing. Everything—you make donuts in the oven and the trucks that deliver them. No matter what you do, it’s so much about energy.”
Even when Trump mentions other aspects of the economy in his tangents about crude oil and gasoline, donuts always find their way into the picture. “If you make donuts, if you make cake, if you’re a lawyer, if you’re an accountant, if you’re in heating or trucking, no matter what you do, energy is so big,” Trump said in a September speech in Maquoketa, Iowa.
One generous interpretation of Trump’s remarks is that he is mentioning donuts as an example—albeit a very specific, very appetizing one—of a regular part of the economy that could be affected by energy policy changes.
As with many Trump claims, however, there’s no evidence to support it. Making donuts does not require any special level of fossil fuel supply. And the latest public data shows the American public as willing as ever to load up on donuts.
In fact, the $7 billion American donut industry is projected to grow another $3 billion by 2027, which analysts attribute to “increased snacking and indulgence consumption.”
To Trump’s rivals in the Democratic Party, there is a fairly simple explanation for Trump’s newfound donut fixation.
“The thing about Trump is, the more you pay attention to what he says, the less any of it makes sense,” said Josh Schwerin, a Democratic consultant who helped run the party’s biggest super PAC in 2020 and now works on climate messaging.
“This is nonsensical from a climate perspective,” Schwerin continued. “Clean energy is creating jobs, not shutting down donut shops. The only real takeaway from these comments is that Trump has donuts on the brain.”
One Trump adviser told The Daily Beast that they had no idea where Trump had picked up the donut line. They didn’t even want to speculate, instead saying in a defeated manner, “I have no idea.”
The Trump campaign did not return a request for comment on the former president’s newfound preoccupation with donuts.
When it comes to the question of what he will do to save donuts, Trump often gets sidetracked. His rhetoric on the sugary treat sometimes ties to his complaints on rising food prices amid inflation, which some blamed on oil prices.
“The people that bake the donuts, the restaurants, everything requires energy. And it’s a very big cost,” Trump said during a July interview on the Fox Business. “Now, everything’s causing inflation. Now we have bad supply lines. Our country’s a mess. We’ll close up the border and become energy-independent. Then we’re going to be energy-dominant.”
But an International Monetary Fund study on food prices in 2022 found other factors to be far more influential on the cost of food than the oil market. The effects of climate change on crop harvests, the war in Ukraine, and interest rate hikes all accounted for a much higher share of the price hikes than oil prices did.
If anything, climate change is expected to jack up food costs globally—a development that could very well affect Trump’s beloved donuts. A new report from the European Central Bank found that food prices could increase as much as 3.2 percentage points through 2060 because of climate change and the increased droughts and storms it will cause.
Trump not only believes climate change is fake but spent his presidency undoing climate policy from the Obama administration, rolling back protections under the Clean Water Act and withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord.
Although the source of Trump’s donut fixation is unclear, it’s usually been the case that his tangents at rallies or in interviews originate from absurd episodes or unusual interests from his life in business.
Take windmills, for example.
Trump didn’t like the sight of offshore windmills from his golf resort in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and became obsessed with trashing them. Most often, that involved dragging the bird community into the discussion.
“I know more about wind than you do,” Trump admonished President Joe Biden in their second debate. “It’s extremely expensive, kills all the birds, it’s very intermittent, it’s got a lot of problems.” (American outdoor cats, it turns out, according to data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, are far more lethal than windmills for birds, taking down an estimated 2.4 billion per year, compared to some 230,000 for wind turbines.)
Still, there might be something to the recurring motif of breakfast in these more recent Trump speeches. Recently, he’s shown some love for another American morning staple when riffing on fossil fuels and the economy.
“They say bacon has gone up five times, meaning five times in the last year and a half, five times,” Trump said during the same speech in New Hampshire, despite bacon remaining at roughly the same price it was in the 1980s, when adjusted for inflation.
“Even I am cutting back on bacon, it’s too expensive,” Trump claimed. “I’m cutting back on it.”
Zachary Petrizzo contributed to this report.
