From the Washington Post today:
Can we just stop this? There is no “sense” to be made of Trump’s tweet. It’s random argle bargle that floats out of his brain. Here’s where the argle bargle comes from:
- Water from many of California’s biggest rivers flows into the San Joaquin River Delta.
- From there it empties into the Pacific Ocean, but over the years more and more of this water has been diverted via levees, dikes, embankments, and canals. This diverted water goes to local farmland, and eventually flows south into Southern California.
- There is an argument about just how much of the Delta’s water should be diverted from its natural course and how much should be allowed to flow naturally out to sea. The argument is complicated, but in a nutshell: farmers want more water diverted while environmentalists want to save the Delta.
This is as much as Trump knows. It’s probably much more than Trump knows. He know there’s some kind of dispute about the water; he knows that farmers are on the side of water not going out to the ocean; he knows that farmers are good and environmentalists are bad; therefore, keeping more of the water in irrigation channels would somehow provide more water for fighting fires.
It isn’t really worth “explaining” this or “fact checking” it or “making sense” of it. There’s no “it” to make sense of. It’s a five-year-old making mud pies and being praised for it by Fox News and a bunch of Twitter trolls. This makes it news, and thus some explanation must be ginned up.
But there isn’t one. It’s the meaningless blathering of a moron. Stop trying to explain it.