Even while on holiday at his Florida resort, Donald Trump has refused to take a break from his unrelenting war on wind energy.
Late Tuesday, the US president posted an image of a dead bird beneath a turbine on social media, accompanied by the lament: “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
The post was immediately amplified by an official White House account on X with more than a million followers.
Unfortunately for Trump’s effort to sow outrage among American patriots at what he proclaimed to be an image of the national bird laid low, closer inspection reveals the photograph does not show a bald eagle and was not taken in the United States. The image actually shows a falcon that was killed at a wind farm in Israel eight years ago.
In his rush to post the image on his social media platform, Trump overlooked a pair of visual clues that might have given him pause. The first is that the bird is missing the distinctive markings of a bald eagle. The second is that the turbine blamed for its death appears to have Hebrew writing on it.
A quick survey of Israeli wind farms blamed for bird deaths reveals that the image in question was indeed taken by Hedy Ben Eliahou, an employee of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, and was featured in a 2017 report in Haaretz, the Tel Aviv news outlet.