When Don Quixote fought windmills in the eponymous novel, he could only rely on the support from his trusty sidekick Sancho Panza and his horse Rocinante. When Don Trump goes to battle with windmills in reality these days, however, he can count on the entirety of the US government to wage this ridiculous war for him.

While the Spanish Don’s obsession with windmills stems from Quixote’s fantastical belief that they are giants which he must defeat, the American Don’s fixation on them is more mundane (yet equally crazy): Nearly 15 years ago, he didn’t like that offshore wind turbines were constructed in view of one of his Scottish golf courses. He has been tilting at them ever since.

But what used to be just one more weird thing about a guy who openly fantasized about dating his own daughter, slathers his face with bronzer, and makes demonstrably false claims whenever he opens his mouth, has become something else now that he is America’s first autocratic president.

To please the Leader, the entire government is now fighting against wind energy, a technology that should be an integral part of the US’s energy strategy.

Last week, for example, the administration halted construction on an offshore wind farm that is about 80 percent complete and would provide enough electricity to power 350,000 homes.

The reason, according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, is national security concerns.

If that makes no sense, let Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum explain it to you.

“In particular there’s concerns about radar relative to undersea – and it doesn’t have to be a large Russian sub – undersea drones, a new technology,” Burgum said. “I mean, the war in Ukraine is showing that swarm attacks by drones, if you are going to launch one into one of the most populous parts in our country, the Pacific Northwest.”

Well, that clears things right up. Never mind that the Pacific Northwest is not the most populous part of the US, and that it is a few thousand miles from this wind farm.

Burgum added that “people with bad ulterior motives to the US would launch a swarm drone attack through wind farms,” and this would make it more difficult to detect them (we really tried to transcribe what exactly he was saying in a way that made any kind of sense but ultimately gave up).

In other words, he has no idea what he is talking about, and this is a contrived reason for shuttering the project that had previously undergone a review that included input from the Pentagon and found it posed negligible risks.

Of course, the real reason why the federal government is shunning a technology that is being embraced across the globe as a renewable energy source, and currently provides 10 percent of the nation’s electricity is much simpler.

Let’s turn to Lee Zeldin, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who summed up very nicely this weekend why the US will shoot itself in the foot and get left behind in a growth industry just because the manbaby in the Oval Office thought that wind turbines ruined the ambience of one of his golf courses more than a decade ago and has embarked on a quixotic quest since then:

“President Trump has been very consistent,” Zeldin said. “He is not a fan of wind.”