Biden takes swipe at Trump with joke that windmills cause cancer, jabbing at the ex-president's debunked claims

• President Joe Biden briefly mocked one of his predecessor's most common falsehoods on Tuesday.
• Biden referenced Trump's longstanding false claim that windmills cause cancer.

President Joe Biden mocked former President Donald Trump on Wednesday by joking that windmills cause cancer while meeting with energy executives to discuss renewable energy.

"I know they cause cancer," Biden said after asking if the executives were getting resistance to putting up more turbines.

After laughter from the audience, Biden added. "Bad joke. I shouldn't kid about that."

Biden's line is a reference to Trump's debunked conspiracy theory from 2019 claiming wind turbines cause cancer.

Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign and during his lone term in office, Trump would periodically riff about scores of ills supposedly posed by windmills.

During a 2020 debate with Biden, Trump said wind turbines kill "all the birds" — not true — and bragged to Biden that he knows "more about wind than you do."

"The wind kills all your birds," Trump said during a tangent at a 2016 campaign rally. "All your birds, killed. You know, the environmentalists never talk about that."

According to data from the US Fish & Wildlife Service, cats are the far bigger culprits when it comes to killing birds.

US felines kill over an estimated 2.4 billion birds annually in the US, compared to some 234,000 for wind turbines.

Trump's longstanding grievances with the renewable energy source goes back to his golf club in Scotland, where he waged a legal battle that he ultimately lost against a proposed offshore wind farm. He was ordered in 2019 to pay $290,000 to the Scottish government for the government's expenses over an independent auditor deployed to determine how much the project would cost the Trump Organization.