CNN’s fact-checker delivered a scathing rebuke of President Donald Trump on Sunday, singling out a distinct and troubling pattern in the president’s public statements: asking Americans to “remember” incidents that never happened. Dale focused on a strange story the 80-year-old president brought up again Thursday, claiming that viewers could not watch his June 27, 2024, debate with President Joe Biden because calm conditions prevented wind turbines from operating, which supposedly caused widespread power failures in areas dependent on wind energy.
Dale explained that the claim is entirely false and falls apart immediately when examined. Around 51 million viewers tuned in to the debate on television, including those in Texas, which generates more wind energy than any other state.
A Story Built on Thin Air
Dale did not mince words in dismantling the claim. "The president is making stuff up again,” he said. Wind operates alongside other energy sources in the electrical grid, and battery systems preserve the power turbines create for periods when conditions are calm. The notion that a windless day could disrupt broadcast signals misunderstands fundamental aspects of electricity infrastructure.
Dale went further, arguing that Trump had invented not just the anecdote but the underlying logic behind it. He said the story was “completely made up,” and that the idea driving it was "completely made up" by the president of the United States as well.
The fixation on wind power is nothing new for Trump. His antipathy toward turbines traces back more than a decade, when officials in Scotland gave approval to a wind farm near Aberdeen that would be visible from one of his golf properties. Trump, who was unable to block that project, has since spun a series of dubious theories — claiming that wind turbines kill whales, cause cancer, and drag down property values. Throughout his second term, he has repeatedly tried to obstruct offshore wind development.
The “Remember” Lies
Dale identified a particular type of fabrication: statements in which Trump asks Americans to recall events that never happened. It is, in Dale’s telling, a distinct rhetorical maneuver, one Trump has deployed across his terms in office.
The great fake wind blackout of 2024 is only one entry in the catalog. Last year, Trump urged people to recall his presence at his Scottish golf property on Brexit voting day, where he supposedly predicted the referendum’s outcome. Dale noted that Trump actually reached the property after votes had been counted and results announced. The distinction matters — predicting a result the day before is prophecy, while commenting on it the day after is simply reading the news.
Dale noted that Trump “has asked people explicitly to remember something that absolutely did not occur,” framing the wind story and the Brexit claim as part of the same troubling habit.
Episodes of Fake History
Dale also highlighted what he termed Trump’s fabricated historical narratives, which the president repeats frequently. One example concerns President George Washington, whom Trump has claimed kept two side-by-side desks in his study, one reserved for private business and the other for the presidency. There is no evidence to support the anecdote.
A more consequential distortion, in Dale’s assessment, concerns the construction of the Panama Canal. Trump recently asserted that 38,000 Americans died building the waterway. The actual toll during the U.S. construction phase was roughly 5,600 people — a fraction of the president’s figure. More than 5,000 of those who died were Black workers from the Caribbean, a group that endured harsh treatment and dangerous conditions. Trump’s inflated number not only misstates the scale of the loss but obscures who actually paid the human cost.
Dale tied the threads together in a blunt summation, saying the president was "making up numbers," concocting anecdotes, and inventing memories he then asks the public to share.
The pattern Dale outlined is not merely a collection of scattered errors. Fabricated statistics, imaginary conversations, and rewritten timelines each carry their own weight, but together they sketch a portrait of a president who treats the historical record as raw material to be reshaped at will. The wind power blackout may be the most absurd of the recent examples — undone by 51 million viewers, many of them in Republican-dominated Texas — but it is far from an isolated slip.