Not only is Donald Trump an idiot, but it is almost impossible to concisely categorize all the myriad ways he is an idiot.
As someone who is looking at the smoke pillars from one of those fires outside my window, I can assure you that this doesn't make any more sense than you think it might. California wildfires have been made worse by viciously hot weather and by dry conditions that are arriving and persisting long past what would have been considered normal a few decades ago. Whether you attribute this to climate change or to magical weather fairies makes no difference, as the results are the same.
California timberlands have been severely damaged by drought and resulting catastrophic insect infestations. Firefighters have been noting, with alarm, that fires that previously would have burned themselves out on their own are now instead maintaining their strength far longer. Rapid human expansion into previously rural areas is compounding the problem; there's simply far more to protect than there was a few decades ago.
And the Trump administration’s repeated and dedicated efforts to cutting firefighting capabilities—to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars—represents a new threat entirely.
As for his two specific claims, they are not so much "wrong" as baffling. There is no "massive amount" of water in California to be diverted to the Pacific Ocean; that is the whole point. There are more claimants for water than there is water to be claimed. The Central Valley aquifer has been dropping precipitously due to farmland pumping; water battles between farmers and urban areas continue to worsen, and rationing is commonplace after any winter with a less-than-average snowpack.
But forget all that, because water diversion doesn't have a damn thing to do with these wilderness fires. Does ... does Donald think we irrigate our currently burning grasslands and forestlands? Does he imagine that we water each tree and mountain—or would, if only the water wasn't being "diverted" to the ocean instead? Is he sincerely stupid enough to think so? It is possible, but for the record: the places water is "diverted" to consist of farmland and major California cities, not brush lands and forests. You could stop up every California river tomorrow and the weather (and the fires) would remain the same.
The nub of Donald's claim is likely a barely literate attempt to weigh in on a long-running battle between California farmers and now-decimated California fisheries. A series of court decisions have ordered limits to just how much water can be taken from salmon spawning grounds and other key fish habitats during drought years, decisions which the very powerful state agricultural lobby has been raising absolute holy hell over because, as mentioned, there is not enough water to satisfy all would-be takers, and it is the farm lobby’s longstanding assertion that all water diverted from or to anywhere in the state belongs, by right, to them. Because Donald is so stupid as to be barely functional and is almost entirely illiterate, he has somehow conflated these pitched Central Valley lobbyist battles with an imagined "massive amount" of invisible water that we apparently should be using to ... water our mountain ranges and forests, if only environmentalists would let us.
As for the reference to "tree clear"ing? The fires are not being caused by too many trees. The current Mendocino Complex fires did not start in forests at all, but spread rapidly through brush and oak-scattered grasslands before reaching anything that could be plausibly considered timberlands. Never mind that, though: there were a great many more trees in California a century ago. It would stand to reason, then, that the fires back then would have been worse. Instead, nearly every one of the state's largest wildfires has come in the last 20 years.
Yes, the evidence suggests there is something going on here more complex than the White House complaint that there are Too Many Trees These Days.
If Donald's "tree clear" claim makes any more sense than his why-aren't-we-taking-more-water claim, it is only because of ambiguity. We can argue there should be more controlled burns to thin out brush lands, but this practice has been hindered by population expansion into rural areas and by more dangerous fire seasons that provide less opportunity for such thinning. We can argue that we should simply strip the trees surrounding rural towns entirely, but you will not get much support for that. We can argue that allowing timber companies to clear-cut thousands of acres would stop fires cold—but they would not, because the resultant scrub and brushland would burn more readily than the forests they replaced.
But since "tree clear" is not an actual policy, we can't judge just what the hell he may have meant. And we can rest assured that he will never follow up with anything more than an equivalently silly word-fart, because it has been proven over and over, on every subject of national concern, that he cannot.
Indeed, he obliged us today.
All right, so now the ambiguity has been removed; he's just an idiot. A moron. A dimwit. A pillar of oversized alphabet blocks wearing a suit and a too-long tie. He sincerely thinks that if we divert water "coming from the North"—where the major fires are currently burning—we can use them for "fires." Perhaps by bottling it and shipping it back, tree by burning tree?
Rest assured, the water is already being diverted. And it's being diverted from the places currently on fire to places that are not. And there would not be "plenty of Water" even if the aforementioned farm lobby succeeded in gutting California fishermen as efficiently as their catches; there isn't enough.
This staggering dimwit honestly thinks that we're "diverting" river water into our ... rivers. He genuinely does. And he is using an ongoing major disaster to argue for taking more water from the regions that are on fire, in order to give it to the places that aren't.
It was far better when he did not acknowledge our California fires at all. At least then there was ambiguity; at least then we could pretend that even if he was the stupidest man or animal to ever wander through the White House, he was at least too busy watching his morning programs and implicating his son in crimes to do anything worse to us. If this unfathomably stupid jackass sets his mind to a new program to strip our rivers of water and forests of trees as his only response to California's worsening fire seasons, it would have been so much better for him to have forgotten our state existed.
