As Los Angeles burns, President-elect Donald Trump is yelling at a fish.
www.vox.com
As devastating wildfires continue to burn through Los Angeles, so far killing at least 10 people and forcing well over 100,000 people to evacuate, or try to, President-elect Donald Trump has decided to point his ire toward a fish. Not the severe Santa Ana
winds that fueled the fires. Not the unusually dry weather. Not the steady march of home development into fire-prone areas.
A fish.
In a
post Wednesday morning on Truth Social, Trump blamed California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for depriving the LA region of water because he wanted to protect “an essentially worthless fish called a smelt.” Trump chided Newsom for not approving a water restoration declaration that
doesn’t exist, per Newsom’s office. He also implied that protections for the delta smelt — a small fish species found only in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, an expansive wetland in Northern California — caused some fire hydrants to run dry in parts of LA. (Earlier this week, fire hydrants in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood ran dry, not because the city had no water but because of
water pressure and other infrastructure issues.)
This isn’t the first time that Trump has bad-mouthed this fish. For nearly a decade now, the incoming president has claimed that he can solve California’s incredibly complex water problems by simply undoing regulations designed to help the delta smelt skirt extinction, as E&E News’s
Jennifer Yachnin has reported. Those problems are not rooted in drought, Trump claims, but in Democratic rules that restrain private interests. In reality, rising temperatures
have made California’s droughts even dryer.
