What he hated more than the turbines was the way they looked—rising taller than the Statue of Liberty, visible from the decks of his golf courses in Scotland. Long before offshore wind reached the U.S. coastline, Trump had been fighting it in court, in Parliament, in the Scottish press. He once tried to force Aberdeenshire to remove their turbines on “aesthetic grounds.” He lost.
But Trump never really loses. He delays. He appeals. He finds smaller fights where he can win. The winds in Scotland blew east. But the grudge blew west.
When Revolution Wind broke ground off Rhode Island, it was supposed to power 350,000 homes. Its construction terminal became the largest offshore wind facility in the country. Danish and American firms invested more than $100 billion in the pipeline. Thousands of workers like Tom moved north from Gulf Coast oil rigs, retraining in union halls.
By 2024, analysts projected over 30 gigawatts of offshore wind power by the end of the decade. For a moment, it looked like the U.S. would leapfrog the North Sea.
Then came the reversal. First, a White House executive order mandating “visual impact assessments” for all renewable energy permits. Then an immediate halt to all federal subsidies, retroactive to January. Then came the lawsuits.
“People don’t like seeing them out there,” Trump said at a June rally. “They like a nice view.”⁴
Project 2025, the blueprint for Trump’s second term, had quietly embedded language to strip renewable infrastructure of its “critical energy” designation. The fossil fuel lobby—now restaffed throughout Energy, Interior, and Commerce—rewrote grant eligibility rules. Investment dried up. Contracts dissolved. And the wind stopped meaning work.⁵
Tom didn’t remember the last time he’d gone a day without thinking about the future—even when the future was the one thing no one offered him anymore.
He lived in Cranston with his brother, near the old shipyard. His knees were shot, and the harness bruises didn’t fade like they used to. But what really scared him was standing still. The quiet. The sense that the world had turned, and he’d been left on a pier with nothing but steel, wind, and debt.
In Iowa, a woman named Mae leased her back fields to a turbine co‑op. “The turbines pay for my son’s braces,” she said. The wind had turned her land into something permanent. When the new order came, she wasn’t angry. She was quiet. “I guess they want us to go back to selling corn.”⁶
The headlines focused on GDP. But out here, that was ten thousand weeks of work. Some men went back to oil. Some to Amazon. A few tried HVAC. Most stayed. The towers were still upright, after all. Maybe someone would finish them.
Opponents of offshore wind often cited harm to fisheries, bird strikes, or coastal views. But Rhode Island’s own environmental‑impact studies had already cleared the project. Local fishermen had joined the planning process. The biggest risk, it turned out, wasn’t turbines—it was government unreliability.
Tom picked up a discarded welding glove from the deck. The inside was still warm.
It’s not just power lines or ports. Each canceled turbine is one less leaf in a forest we need to build to dull the heat.