Bizarre is normal..

California rejects Trump's bizarre 'enjoy the water' claim

By Stephen Council

When Californians turn on their showers and fill up their coffee makers on Tuesday, President Donald Trump wants credit.

He’s been criticizing the state’s water use since major fires began in Los Angeles in early January, but this week, Trump ramped up the discourse. He signed a new executive order, released Sunday, that told federal agencies to find ways to override California’s state water policies — the order framed the policies as “disastrous” and called the water infrastructure in Los Angeles “inadequate” for fighting fires.

Then, Monday evening, Trump elaborated on the executive order with one of the strangest claims of his young second presidency.

“The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond,” read Trump’s post on the social media network Truth Social. 

It’s so odd a claim it verges on the inexplicable, though it falls in line with Trump’s repeated references to a “faucet” holding water back from Southern California. In September, he said at a news conference that if elected, he’d turn on a “very large faucet” to send millions of gallons of water from the Pacific Northwest’s Columbia River to Los Angeles, per Portland’s KOIN-TV. No canal or pipeline exists that could carry that water.

His Monday post finished, “The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!”

The post earned a near-immediate refutation from California’s Department of Water Resources. In a blunt, spare post to X, the agency cut down Trump’s claims.

“The military did not enter California,” it said. “The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful.”

California also posted a list of expert quotes discussing Trump’s statements and order on water. Peter Gleick, a hydro-climatologist, called the order a mix of “bluster, ignorance, and disinformation.” Miles Johnson, legal director for Columbia Riverkeeper, in Oregon, called the idea of a turnable valve “completely far-fetched and detached from reality.”   

The Association of California Water Agencies wrote in a Jan. 22 news release that the state’s general water supply was not the issue during the Los Angeles fires. Reservoirs around the state are at average to high levels. But some fire crews did find hydrants running dry — the association said the limitations of the urban water system were to blame, as water pressure dropped and hydrants dried up.

On Jan. 10, Gov. Gavin Newsom directed officials to investigate the dry hydrants and figure out what local governments can do to provide “adequate water supply for emergency response during future catastrophic events.”