Fact-Checker Lists Trump’s Many Lies About Wildfires

CNN’s Daniel Dale always has the receipts:

I showed a social media post from the president-elect yesterday to an expert in California water policy, a man named Jeffrey Mount. He said, Abby, none of it is true. So this has just been a staggering quantity of wrongness from the president-elect in a very short period of time.

And there have been some small specific examples. Like, he keeps saying that Governor Newsom refused to sign a so-called water restoration declaration. In fact, no such declaration even exists, as Newsom’s office has pointed out. He also said yesterday that they’re not using firefighting planes. We’ve seen those planes. They’re there.

But more than that, Abby, I think the president-elect has promoted an overarching false narrative. You heard a bit of it there, that the challenges we’re seeing in the firefighting effort have something to do with a long-running policy battle about how much water should be kept in the north of the state to protect fish species like the delta smelt and other environmental ecosystems, and how much should be sent to the south to help agricultural interests. Farmers in an area called the Central Valley.

Now, two water policy experts in California told me emphatically yesterday, none of this has anything to do with each other. There is simply no connection between the protection of that smelt fish in that estuary in the delta in the north. And what we’re seeing in the south for a number of reasons.

But number one, there is no shortage of water in the Los Angeles area. The reservoirs are at or above historical levels. The water is there. Now, we have seen high-profile issues in one part of the city, Pacific Palisades, where some hydrants were dry or did not have a lot of water. But that was not because there was not enough water in the region. That was because of technical, logistical infrastructure issues related to the hilly mountainous terrain and the location where water tanks have been situated.

So, the idea that not enough water has been sent down from the north and instead has been, you know, protecting a little fish there and that’s why we’re seeing these fires be hard to contain, simply does not bear out at all.

Read the full transcript.