Trump Drains California’s Most Precious Resource for a Photo Op

In 2014, a teenaged idiot was caught taking a leak in an urban reservoir in Portland, Oregon. The diluted pee was no health threat; the reservoir is open-air, and birds shit and piss in it daily. But the city made a decision, seemingly fit for a Portlandia sketch, to treat the reservoir as a ginormous urinal, flushing all 38 million gallons, before refilling the bowl.

I was raised in arid California, where water conservation is a form of morality. As a then-recent transplant to the rain-drenched Pacific Northwest, witnessing this preposterous waste of reservoir water was something akin to watching a big game hunter kill an elephant for sport. 

These ghastly feelings surfaced again last week as President Donald Trump ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to uselessly dump “billions” of gallons of water from reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Bakersfield — attempting to warp physical reality to match his twisted hallucinations about California’s water engineering. 

Trump’s order followed weeks of ignorant bluster about how the catastrophic Los Angeles wildfires could have been prevented if only state officials had turned a mythical “valve” to send more water to Southern California.

Trump displays no demonstrable knowledge of how wildfire works. Los Angeles was vulnerable to the catastrophic firestorms of the past month because the region had received 0.16 inches of rainfall since June, a full four inches below average, in the driest stretch in more than 60 years. It was a drought exacerbated by climate change. 

This lack of rainfall made the grasses and scrub where foothills meet the Los Angeles cityscape — what planners call the urban-wild interface — into a tinder box. Trump, whose idea of getting out into nature is playing 18 holes at a manicured golf course, can’t seem to fathom that the canyons and brushlands surrounding America’s second-largest metropolis don’t benefit from sprinkler irrigation.

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Local water issues likely hampered Southern California firefighters. But they had nothing to do with state-led water rationing. A reservoir serving Pacific Palisades sat empty because it had been drained for maintenance. And the hurricane-force Santa Ana winds that whipped the firestorms also kept firefighting aircraft out of the sky, overtaxing reliance on municipal water to fight the flames.

But such nuance is lost on the 47th president. 

Trump has had California politics living rent-free in his head since he first learned of state efforts to ensure sufficient fresh water for the endangered Delta Smelt, a small fish that lives near the mouth of the Sacramento River in Northern California. Trump perceives this small act of environmental preservation as putting a “worthless fish” over water-hungry farms and human profits. 

Trump has been so exercised over this issue that he threatened to withhold disaster aid from California on the campaign trail, unless Gov. Gavin “Newscum” curtailed natural river outflows. And on his first day in office, Trump issued an executive order absurdly titled: “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California.”

As Trump blustered, a combination of brave firefighting and actual rainstorms enabled nearly complete containment of the wildfires last week. But Trump was still determined to act — to match his big mouth with bigger action. And so, last Friday, the Army Corps abruptly began emptying reservoirs that flow into the Central Valley — lowering lakes that are at least a three-hour drive north of Los Angeles, on the other side of the Tehachapi Mountains. 

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This squandering of water made the Portland urinal flush look like a child’s game. It more resembled the malevolent act of a mad king. 

In a post on Truth social Trump posted a photo of the “beautiful water flow that I just opened in California,” touting a one-day release of “1.6 billion gallons” and bragging that “in 3 days, it will be 5.2 billion gallons.” Trump insisted “everybody should be happy” about his “Victory!” He added nonsensically: “I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!”

In reality, Trump is double-crossing the very farmers whose water interests he’s long claimed to represent. There was little coordination with state and local officials, meaning Trump’s big flush threatened to create an actual flood. Only pushback by local agriculture interests and state officials convinced the Army Corps to lessen the outflows to avert a disaster. 

Alex Padilla, California’s senior senator, has already written an angry letter slamming the administration for “recklessly endangering residents downstream.” And even Trump admitted Monday: “We did it a very rough way.”

Worse, by dumping reservoirs during the rainy season, Trump is setting up hardship for farmers during the summer growing months — when temperatures soar, the ground cracks, and those precious gallons won’t be available to Central Valley growers who feed the nation and create profitable exports. 

Will the dumped water find any productive use? For now the sole perceivable benefit is creating optics to aggrandize the president himself. “The water is flowing in California” he posted on Truth Social, adding pictures showing Central Valley canals he described as “brimming with beautiful, clean water, and heading to farmers throughout the State, and to Los Angeles.”

Americans rely on government to protect us — or at the very least do us no harm. But for Trump, this duty as protector in chief is always subordinate to an insatiable need for aggrandizement, to paint himself as the bold actor, and the strong man. As he said of the water release Monday: “I had to do it. And it was not easy.”