As the smoke from the Pacific Palisades and Eaton fires started to clear on the rainy night of January 27, President Trump put the finishing flourish on his fire response by posting to Truth Social, “The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond.”
Here in California, it wasn’t clear what the president was jabbering about this time. State Senate president pro tempore Mike McGuire tried to decode the post, noting that federal water pumps that had been down for repair are back on, but the rest was a muddle. Infrastructure doesn’t exist to feed water from the Pacific Northwest to California.
For weeks, Trump has been feeding the mythical narrative that blue-haired California liberals are blocking water in the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta from getting where it needs to go out of wrongheaded deference to the environment. The idea that the military just smacked them down is the latest variation on this tale. It’s wrong and unhelpful, but it’s a fun story for California-haters. The fundamental problem, though, is that while Trump has claimed to be helping Los Angeles, what he and a number of Republican congressmen are actually advocating is disaster capitalism thinly disguised as aid for our state in a time of crisis. The true beneficiaries of such policies aren’t the people fighting wildfires but, rather, big agribusiness.
When news broke that some hydrants ran dry during the fires, it rhymed with vintage conservative beliefs about environmentalism gone mad. The accepted Fox News narrative is now that loony leftists and their environmentalist naïveté turned these fires into a disaster that could have been prevented. For Trump, the fires were yet another opportunity to gore an ox his fans love to see bleed: Governor Gavin Newsom.
But even for someone like me who is intensely critical of Newsom, watching this president continue to willfully misunderstand my state’s signature political issue while he scores points by shooting spit wads at the smoking ruins of our communities is beyond galling. With Trump’s second term now in full swing, and the Democratic Party still in its stupor of despair, few in California are eager to get animated about Trump all over again. When Trump visited Los Angeles, the purpose was clearly to generate news clips of himself dunking on local figures like Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. His statements and policies may seem like they’re barely worth an eye roll, but they get worse the longer you look.
Predictably, Trump’s opening volley, issued when he was still president-elect, was an attack on a “worthless fish called a smelt.” The delta smelt is a critically endangered species in the Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta. Big Ag in California loves to hate the smelt because a small amount of State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project water goes toward conservation each year. This conservative talking point is way past its expiration date, and plenty of ink has been painstakingly spilled trying to school Trump on the reality that smelt conservation has nothing to do with Los Angeles’s difficulty fighting the latest fires. “Enough people have probably corrected this for us to be fairly sure that it’s not confusion,” said former California State Water Resources Control Board chair Felicia Marcus, when asked about Trump’s perspective on the smelt.
“There is no way massive amounts of water can be moved south of the Delta simply by getting rid of environmental regulations that protect fish and wildlife,” Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow at the Water Policy Center at the Public Policy Center of California, and emeritus professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Davis, told The New Republic. “This is such an overconstrained system that there just isn’t the kind of flexibility some imagine.”
Trump’s revival of smelt discourse is a way of dodging the complexity of our state’s politics, which many Californians know a lot more about than Trump does. Claiming that water can just appear to serve everyone’s needs if Californians would just grow up is a little like Trump claiming he can beat the entire state of Louisiana in a gumbo-making competition—not just wrong but painful and embarrassing to listen to.
California’s water wars are almost two centuries old, and the constant give-take-and-give of claims on scarce water among urban, agricultural, and environmental interests in California never ends. “If you’re the Water Board, you’re trying to maximize all beneficial uses,” Marcus told me. “And every few years when the administration changes, it feels like there’s a big swing. In this case, it’s just chaff and chaos thrown into the mix, and that just plays into what is already a very difficult thing to explain to the public.”
While some people “really believe that we’re, you know, sending water to fish for a fun water slide because we want to hurt ag,” Marcus said, the nuanced truth about the Delta ecosystem is that if not enough freshwater flows through it, ocean water from the San Francisco Bay will intrude, making it too salty for agricultural or urban use. It must be frustrating if you’re a farmer, knowing freshwater flows into San Francisco Bay, and the smelt seems to be a sort of synecdoche for this frustration, but, Mount told me, “all of that water set aside for the ecosystem creates a measurable improvement in water quality for cities and farms.”
Farms are the parties whose cries for help Trump regularly hears. While the president is talking as if he’s trying to curb environmental restrictions on behalf of fire victims, corporate agriculture would be the real beneficiary of the policies he seems to be advancing. On day one of his new administration, Trump issued a pointless executive order with “Putting People Over Fish” in the title, requiring that the Department of the Interior “route more water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to other parts of the state for use by the people there who desperately need a reliable water supply.” The implication is that water will be “routed” to fire-plagued Southern California, but Southern California reservoirs were full when the fires broke out after an unusually wet 2024; local water infrastructure problems, not state-wide water flows, appear to have led to the dry hydrants.
On January 24, Trump issued a second executive order requiring the Interior and Commerce Departments to “override” California’s management of its own water in the event that activities “unduly burden efforts to maximize water deliveries.” This order impacts the federal government’s Central Valley Project, which delivers water to farms, but not Southern California cities. As in his first term, this is a naked attempt to curb environmental restrictions and pipe more fresh water to large farms in the Central Valley—the farms famous for churning eye-popping amounts of scarce California water into unnecessary but massively profitable crops like almonds. Needless to say, this executive order won’t do anything about dry fire hydrants. “If anything, it would put less in L.A. fire hydrants,” Marcus told me.
It’s depressing and, of course, makes one want to change the channel, but unfortunately it all matters a great deal in material terms as the effects of climate change clobber California. “There is little doubt in the scientific community that shocks—including water supply reliability and quality, flood control, coastal flooding, and losses of native biodiversity—will increase in frequency and intensity,” Mount said.
So while the acute emergency phase seems to be over, the grind of urgent California water issues remains. Our president has responded by parachuting into the disaster area and flooding the zone not with water but, as always, with shit.
