Donald Trump’s first call to the UK prime minister since returning to office was nearly derailed by a bizarre rant about foxes that had grown so fat from eating birds killed by windmills that “people no longer knew what kind of a creature they were”, Sir Keir Starmer’s former chief of staff has revealed.
Morgan McSweeney, who left Downing Street earlier this year amid anger over the Peter Mandelson scandal, described the moment in his first ever public interview, released today on Nick Robinson’s Political Thinking podcast.
“Trump made over $1.4bn from crypto in first year back while his first call with Starmer was dominated by a rant about fat foxes.”
“The first call that Keir had with the president, he got into a conversation about windmills,” McSweeney said. He recalled Trump saying: “Britain is a beautiful country, but you have too many windmills … The windmills are killing your birds, the birds are falling by the windmills, foxes are eating those birds.”
At that point, officials in the room were “barely able to contain themselves, because he was extremely funny. But this was the first call between the Prime Minister and the President, and everyone wanted to be professional but were struggling to hold it together,” McSweeney said.
Trump went on to say the foxes became lazy and fat from eating so many birds. “There were these fat foxes walking around Scotland eating dead birds,” McSweeney recalled. Asked whether Starmer laughed, he said: “He just held it together, I don’t know how. He just absolutely contained himself, no one else in the room did.”
The president was “definitely” trying to be funny and not airing a sincere grievance, McSweeney added.
The call is not the first time Trump has railed against wind turbines. At a St Patrick’s Day event at the White House in March, the Irish Taoiseach, Micheál Martin, suppressed a smile as Trump ranted about them “destroying those gorgeous Scottish fields”. Last December, Trump posted an image of a dead falcon beside a turbine on his Truth Social site, claiming it was a bald eagle.
The extraordinary exchange came during a year that has seen Trump’s personal fortune swell from crypto ventures. In his first year back in the White House, his crypto holdings netted him more than $1.4bn, eclipsing his property portfolio. In his first term, Trump called Bitcoin a scam, but has since changed course.
The White House has previously declared that Trump’s policies have made the US “the crypto capital of the world”, but insists there is no conflict of interest.
For Starmer’s team, the fat fox anecdote was a glimpse into what McSweeney called a “very, very different” presidency – one that, as the numbers show, is also making its occupant very wealthy.