President Donald Trump had some choice words about wind power during a Friday meeting with top oil executives, and the facts tell a rather different story than his comments suggest.

Trump has never been shy about his disdain for wind energy. "My goal is to not let any windmill be built. They are losers. They lose money, they destroy your landscape, they kill your birds," he told the assembled oil industry leaders.

But it was his claim about China that really raised eyebrows. "All you have to do is say to China 'How many windmill areas do you have in China?' So far they are not able to find any. They use coal and they use oil and gas and some nuclear, not much. But they don't have windmills. They make them and sell them to suckers like Europe and suckers like the United States before," Trump said.

Here's the thing: China doesn't just have wind farms. It absolutely dominates the sector. The country operates roughly 444,000 megawatts of wind farm capacity as of February 2025—that's about 44% of the entire world's wind power. To put it in perspective, that's nearly triple what the U.S. has installed.

Chinese manufacturers also controlled 65% of global wind capacity in 2023 and a staggering 74% of all large-scale solar and wind projects under construction in the first half of 2025. So yes, China builds windmills. But they're also the world's biggest user of the technology they manufacture.

"Those windmills are so pathetic and so bad. And most of them are built in China, and I give China a lot of credit. They build them, but they have very few wind farms," Trump continued, apparently unaware that the opposite is true.