Tilting at Progress

Combining data analysis and a 400-year-old novel to make sense of Trump’s obsession with windmills.

I first read Don Quixote in college because of a friend. He cited it as his favorite book—a weird choice for an 18-year-old, I thought. He was an all-around endearing and earnest person. He came from an ultra-conservative rural Utah town, identified as a Wobbly, and had somehow found himself at a conservative Catholic school in ultra-liberal Portland. Mismatched through and through. But he was so enthusiastic describing the book that I decided to read it.

When Trump posted yet again this week that windmills are “killing all our beautiful bald eagles”—accompanied by an image that turned out to be a falcon in Israel—it was hard not to think of Don Quixote.

We use “tilting at windmills” casually to mean fighting imaginary enemies. But Cervantes had something more specific in mind.

Don Quixote is about a man who can’t accept the modern world as it is, so he recasts it as something he can heroically fight against. In the famous scene, Quixote sees windmills. His companion and squire Sancho says, “Those are just windmills.” Quixote insists they’re evil giants—monsters—in disguise.

Quixote isn’t hallucinating. He sees exactly what Sancho sees. He just claims to know what’s really going on underneath. Sound familiar?

One common interpretation is that Cervantes chose windmills deliberately. In early 17th-century Spain, windmills were new technology—modern infrastructure spreading across La Mancha, changing the landscape and the economy. They represented progress. And Quixote, trapped in his fantasy of a glorious past, couldn’t accept them as mere machines. They had to be monsters.

This is the deeper meaning that gets lost when we reduce the phrase to “fighting imaginary battles.” Quixote isn’t imagining things that aren’t there. He’s refusing to accept what they are. The windmill is real. The monster is the fiction he needs to justify his war against a world that has moved on without him.

Trump follows the same bizarre logic. You can’t wage a heroic war against a power grid, so he invents a villain. Wind turbines don’t just generate power; they cause cancer. He transforms boring infrastructure into a sinister enemy he can fight.

I’ve been tracking Trump’s statements about windmills for a while now, and after the falcon-eagle post I decided to run the numbers. His attacks on wind energy go back to 2012—when he first fought an offshore wind farm near his Scottish golf resort. Over the following 13 years, Trump has clocked over 50 documented attacks, with a sharp spike in 2025.

The ways he vilifies windmills are deeply weird. “Stupid.” “Ugly.” “Junk.” “Hoax.” “Killing field.” “Bird cemetery.” And yes—“monstrous” and “monstrosities.” Almost as if he were mimicking Quixote. In his telling, they kill eagles, cause cancer, ruin communities, destroy countries, murder whales. None of it holds up to scrutiny. None of that matters.

In the novel, Quixote charges at the windmills. Reality hits back. He’s thrown from his horse and badly hurt. Does he rethink his beliefs? No. He says an enchanter must have turned the giants into windmills at the last second to steal his victory.

In 2020, Trump’s own aides told him plainly: you lost the election. “Those are just windmills.” Trump couldn’t accept it. So he sent Rudy Giuliani to Four Seasons Total Landscaping to declare that dark forces had conjured his win into a loss at the last moment.

Once you adopt that logic, no evidence can change your mind—it only proves the conspiracy runs deeper. Facts become proof of the plot. The unfalsifiable worldview locks into place. Five years later, he’s still charging.

False beliefs aren’t harmless when they motivate action. They cause real damage while solving nothing. The monsters were never real. The wreckage is.

Turning progress into an enemy doesn’t stop it. It just makes it more painful. The windmills kept turning in La Mancha. They’ll keep turning here.

Cervantes wrote Don Quixote as satire four centuries ago. We’re still watching a confidently wrong man—whose willful subordination of truth to his ego is mistaken for delusion—charge at windmills because he can’t accept progress.