Mary Trump, Donald Trump’s estranged niece, took to social media on Saturday to make a new request of the former president after his appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
Trump, the GOP presidential nominee, sat down for an episode of The Joe Rogan Experience on Friday as part of his push to reach voters—namely, younger males—through nontraditional media circuits, such as streaming platforms and podcasts.
During Friday’s podcast, Trump was asked by Rogan about whales, seemingly in reference to previous remarks the former president has made in which he said wind turbines off the East Coast “are causing whales to die in numbers never seen before”.
“Well, they say the wind drives them crazy. You know it’s a vibration because you have those, those things are 50 story buildings, some of them…The wind is rushing, things are blowing, its vibration and it makes noise. You know what it is? I want to be a whale psychiatrist. It drives the whales freaking crazy. Something happens with them, but for whatever reason they’re getting washed up on shore and yet the environmentalists don’t talk about it,” Trump said on Rogan’s podcast.
Trump first made remarks regarding this at a North Carolina rally in 2023 when some conservationists at the time raised concerns about whale deaths near the development of an offshore wind farm.
However, there is no evidence that offshore wind turbines are killing whales, according to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
In response to Trump’s remarks on Rogan’s podcast, Mary Trump, an outspoken critic of her uncle, took to X, formerly Twitter, to request that he not become a “whale psychiatrist.”
“Donald, on behalf of whales everywhere, please DO NOT become a whale psychiatrist,” she wrote on Saturday afternoon.
Newsweek has reached out to Trump’s campaign via email for comment.
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According to the NOAA, since 2016 they have been tracking the “unusual mortality” of humpback whales along the eastern shores and over the past six years, tallied 178 dead humpback whales from Florida to Maine.
In response, NOAA performed necropsies on about half the whales and found that of those, 40 percent of the deaths were caused by human interaction, such as being caught in fishing gear or struck by vessels.
“There is no information supporting that any of the equipment used in support of offshore wind development could directly lead to the death of a whale,” Benjamin Laws, deputy chief for permits and conservation with NOAA Fisheries Office of Protected Resources, said at the time. “There are no known connections between any offshore wind activities and any whale stranding.”
Meanwhile, Trump previously said in 2019, without any evidence, that the noise from wind turbines can cause cancer.
“If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value. And they say the noise causes cancer,” then-President Trump said while delivering remarks at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual spring dinner.
According to the National Library of Medicine, there is no proven link to serious health conditions from wind turbines.