WASHINGTON – Exactly 10 days after taking the oath of office earlier this year, Donald Trump nearly drowned dozens, if not hundreds, of his own citizens in California’s Central Valley.
Trump unilaterally decided to solve the Los Angeles wildfires by opening the taps to allow billions of liters of water stored in two reservoirs at the foot of the Sierra Nevada to flow into Southern California.
“Imagine the incredible flow of water I just turned on in California. Today, 1.6 billion liters, in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion liters,” he boasted on social media, alongside a photo of water flowing into a stream. “Everyone should celebrate this long-awaited victory! I wish they had listened to me 6 years ago; there would have been no fires!”
However, not a single drop of those billions of liters could have reached Los Angeles, or even the surrounding area. However, the overflow would have caused the rivers leading to Lakes Kaweah and Success to burst their banks, threatening residents of the surrounding communities.
“This was clearly just a failed publicity stunt. And it was dangerous,” California Democratic Senator Alex Padilla said at the time. “Any unexpected, unnoticed water release threatens lives and the safety of local communities if water floods somewhere without proper coordination.”
The disaster, which would likely have resulted in drownings, was averted thanks to the swift action of local water management officials, who persuaded the Army Corps of Engineers to overturn Trump’s order to open the dams to full capacity and release less water.
However, that didn’t stop Trump from continuing to boast about his decision, adding the hydrologically impossible claim that the water in question came from Canada. “I think the water comes from northwest Canada, but also from the Pacific Northwest, and it comes down by the millions of barrels a day. And I turned it on,” he said at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 6.
“Thank you so much, Canada, we appreciate that,” he said during a photo op in the Oval Office two months later. “They poured all that water directly into the Pacific Ocean. They installed a big valve, a giant valve the size of this room, and they opened it. It takes a day to operate.”
David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and co-discoverer of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which describes how some people with limited skills in a given field overestimate their level of expertise, said he struggled to explain Trump’s belief that water from Canada would somehow flow to California, other than by its relative position on a standard map of North America.
“People take the information they know and misapply it,” Dunning said. “In his case, north is up and south is down. I think the reasoning is that water flows down. If he turns on the tap, water from Canada will flow to irrigate crops in California.”
White House advisers did not respond to questions about Trump’s decision, which wasted billions of liters of water, or any other inquiries related to this matter.
Whatever Trump’s true thinking, this episode is just one example of his inability to understand the problem, his propensity to make a decision based on a conspiracy theory he heard, the ill-informed speculation of a member of his club, or even a simple whim based on absolute trust in his instincts.
These decisions differ from the policies pursued by his administration during its second term, which reflect the long-standing ambitions of the Republican Party and its dominant faction, which Trump took control of a decade ago. Strikes against Iranian nuclear sites, the massive deployment of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) across the country, slashing Medicaid, extending and deepening tax cuts, and defunding the Public Broadcasting Corporation: all of this could have happened under any Republican president, especially one who came to power with an anti-establishment, anti-elitist populism.
However, many of Trump’s other decisions are not the result of well-considered ideologies, or even ill-considered ones. For example, no conservative think tank publishes a white paper proposing to stop wildfires by pumping water 320 kilometers into the ground. Rather, these white papers are the product of the absurd convictions of the 47th president of the United States, who clings to them despite all evidence to the contrary.
This is because the president is astoundingly ignorant—in the words of one of his top advisers during his first term, “an idiot.”
Some of these beliefs, such as the insistence that sea-level rise will somehow create more oceanfront property, have little real-world impact. Others have had major consequences. Trump’s certainty that other countries pay tariff revenue to the United States has created a drag on the U.S. and global economies, spiking prices for consumers and battering domestic farmers and manufacturers.
That he is willing to go to the mat for patently incorrect ideas in this second term, of course, should come as little surprise. In his first term, he embellished a hurricane tracking map with his magic marker, making it appear that cities in Alabama were in the storm’s path. It led to alarmed calls and forced the local National Weather Service office to issue a statement that there was no threat.
Most famously, he once extrapolated from a scientist’s finding that ordinary disinfectants killed the COVID-19 pathogen on hard surfaces to suggest that people could inject it into their bodies to eliminate the virus. Makers of Clorox and other products rushed out statements warning against ingesting them.
“I’ve never met anyone else remotely like him,” said Charles Leerhsen, who co-wrote Trump’s book, “Surviving at the Top” in 1990. “He is and was profoundly stupid, completely lacking in intellectual curiosity.”