The Guardian has a detailed backgrounder on Trump’s confusion plus lying about California v water.

On his first day in office, Trump directed the secretary of commerce and the secretary of the interior to develop a new plan that will “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”.

Cool plan, but then what to do about the people who will desperately need a reliable water supply after Trump “fixes” things?

In a memorandum titled “Putting People over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California”, Trump directed the agencies to reprise the efforts of his first administration, which challenged the state’s environmental protection regulations, and allowed more water to be pumped for agriculture and cities.

Because who needs environmental protection? Environments aren’t a real thing, they’re just some fancy idea invented by a bunch of hippies. Pump that water into cities and almond orchards until it’s all gone and everybody moves to some place where there’s water.

[T]he order, which relied heavily on misinformation about the fire disaster in Los Angeles to give urgency to the directive, showed a sweeping disconnect between Trump’s view of the issues and the intricate and layered policies already in place.

Moreover, experts told the Guardian, it could bring a new layer of turmoil to California’s complicated negotiations over water use, derailing years of discussions between state and federal officials, water policy experts, tribes, conservationists and farmers over how best to steward and distribute water.

Here’s the thing: there isn’t enough water. There’s a disconnect between California and its agriculture and its cities on the one hand and its water supply on the other. California has acted as if it had access to infinite water, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the fault of lefty wackos.

Formed at the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the delta flows through the San Francisco Bay and out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s the largest estuary on the west coast, supplying water to roughly 30 million people, irrigating 6m acres of farmland and supporting endangered species and threatened ecosystems. It has also long been center stage in complicated and protracted conflicts over the state’s essential and increasingly sparse water resources.

Plans completed by the Biden administration and California officials, only just announced last December, have already increased the amount of water flowing to urban areas and farms, even as delta species continue to decline.

The plans were years in the making, according to water officials, and the work to find paths forward that supply millions of residents, support swaths of the $49bn agriculture industry, and leave enough in the systems for threatened ecosystems and communities severely affected by the declining waterways – including tribes that closely rely on them for sustenance and cultural identity – has been an enormous challenge.

Why’s that? Because there isn’t enough. Magic Trump can’t change that just by babbling at it (or any other way).

In posts on Truth Social over the past two weeks, Trump brought up the battles from his first term and blamed state water policies for the catastrophic outcome of the Palisades fire, which killed at least 11 people in Los Angeles earlier this month.

In a press conference on Tuesday, he repeated the critique, saying California “created an inferno”, with its water policies. “Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn on the valve,” he said, a confusing mischaracterization of how water systems operate.

There’s this valve, see. It sits in the Golden Valve Hall, waiting for the golden man from Queens to turn it on.

Speaking on Fox News later on Tuesday, Trump went even further, threatening to deny California federal aid to recover from the wildfires over the issue.

“I don’t think we should give California anything until they let water flow down,” he said.

There’s that “down” crap again. “Down” from where? Is he thinking there’s a giant Mount Reservoir somewhere in California, with all the water in a tub on the peak?

Experts have refuted the claims that the fires could have been stopped with more water, and in particular with more water from the delta. Los Angeles gets most of its water from other sources, including Owens Valley and the Colorado River. There was also ample water available at the time the fires erupted.

Hoses went dry during the harrowing firefights in the Pacific Palisades, not because the city was out of water but because the municipal water systems are ill-equipped to handle multiple and simultaneous withdrawals at such a scale.

Because they’re not magic. We don’t think about them much because they mostly work, but the Palisades fire wasn’t a mostly fire.

“There is no need to increase water deliveries from the Bay-Delta or any other source from which LA imports water for the region to be able to fight the current fires,” the advocacy organization LA Water Keeper said in a resource page issued to the press, adding that the real threat to the region’s water supplies was climate change.

“The sources of our water imports – Mono Lake, Bay delta, Colorado River – are drying up due to climate change, and are themselves at risk of future interruptions due to natural disasters.”

Colorado River – that’s the one that used to flow through the Grand Canyon and out to the Pacific but has now dried to a trickle in some places. We done overused it. If Trump knew things he would know this.

“Despite recent misinformation, California is delivering more water to farmers and southern regions of the state than under the Trump administration,” the office of California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, said in a statement, crediting strategic negotiations with the Biden administration. “Regardless, these water flows have zero impact on the ability of first responders to address the fires in southern California.”

Yeah yeah yeah. Just turn on the valve.