The former President’s plan to bring water to the California desert is, like a lot of his promises, a goofy pipe-dream.
In an apparent effort to address the pressing issue of California water shortages, Trump said the following: “You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps and Canada, and all pouring down and they have essentially a very large faucet. You turn the faucet and it takes one day to turn it, and it’s massive, it’s as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. You turn that, and all of that water aimlessly goes into the Pacific (Ocean), and if they turned it back, all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles,” he said.
Amidst his weird, almost poetic rambling, the “very large faucet” Trump seems to have been referring to is the Columbia River. The Columbia runs from a lake in British Columbia, down through Oregon and eventually ends up in the Pacific Ocean. Trump’s apparent plan is to somehow divert water from the Columbia and get it all the way down to Los Angeles. However, scientific experts who have spoken to the press have noted that not only is there currently no way to divert the water from the Oregon River to southern California, but creating such a system would likely be prohibitively expensive and inefficient.
I love that Trump has no ability to do any critical thinking, and thinks of everything as very literal now. He believes the planes are actually invisible, the only way to prevent Forrest fires is to actually rake the forest, and now that a literal giant faucet would be used to divert water in what kinda sounds like a Roman aqueduct to Socal.
I also agree that journalists should not be spinning Trump’s word salad, that makes zero sense, by calling them “poetic” and then trying to explain what the hell he is maybe trying to say. He is running to the President of the US, if he can’t explain how he wants to use plumbing to divert water from the Columbia river to Socal he should be asked about that over and over until he can articulate that. Journalists doing the heavy lifting of making real ideas out of Trump’s babble should be looked down upon. Instead they continue to “both sides” anything left of the far-right.
I think he has things explained to him that are drastically dumbed down to give him a chance of comprehension. Then he misunderstands the explanation, and misremembers the entire exchange, and we get the word vomit that has the barest shadow of reality.
He is also famous for not listening, because he thinks he is smarter than everyone in the room. He is also rarely held accountable for any of the word salad that he spews like a firehose. He also surrounds himself with people providing constant negative reinforcement of rewarding him like he actually did well, when in reality he functions so outside acceptable for most things. Then couple that with being a classic narcissist and it’s not surprising he is basically clueless on almost any subject asked of him.