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Trump Blames Los Angeles Wildfires on Newsom and Delta Smelt [1]

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Date: 2025-01-09

As apocalyptic scenes emerged from the climate change-induced fires raging across the Pacific Palisades, Pasadena and elsewhere in Los Angeles County, President Elect Donald Trump yesterday blasted California Governor Gavin Newsom on Truth Social for not signing a “water declaration” that would provide more water for Californians.

As he has done many times before because of his complete lack of knowledge about California water and fish populations, Trump blamed it all on the Delta Smelt when in reality the smelt has nothing to do with the current LA region wildfires or any other wildfires.

An initial estimate of the cost of the LA fires is between $52 billion and $57 billion, making it the most expensive fire event in history, according to AccuWeather Inc.

Trump said Newsom “refused to sign the water restoration declaration put before him that would have allowed millions of gallons of water, from excess rain and snow melt from the North, to flow daily into many parts of California, including the areas that are currently burning in a virtually apocalyptic way. He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt, by giving it less water (it didn’t work!), but didn’t care about the people of California.”

Newsom's office sent the following statement to ABC10 to expose this lie:

“There is no such document as the water restoration declaration – that is pure fiction. The Governor is focused on protecting people, not playing politics, and making sure firefighters have all the resources they need.”

The second Big Lie in Trump’s statement is that the Delta Smelt is “an essentially worthless fish.”

Based on my experience as a journalist who written more stories and done more research into the demise of the Delta smelt than any other journalist I’m aware of, the Delta Smelt is definitely not a “worthless fish.”

In fact, the Delta Smelt is a key indicator species that demonstrates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast of the Americas. The 2 to 3 inch fish that smells like a cucumber is found only in the Delta. It was once the most abundant fish in the Delta, but now is functionally extinct in the wild. due to massive water exports to agribusiness and other factors, including invasive species, toxics and pollution, over the past several decades.

The third Big Lie is Trump’s claim that Newsom is denying Californians water in order to protect the smelt. In fact, the state and federal governments under both Republican and Democratic administrations have done a terrible job of protecting the fish over the past three decades, despite the smelt’s listing as “endangered” under both the state and federal Endangered Species Acts.

Delta Smelt is functionally extinct in the wild

Zero smelt have been caught over the past six years in the California Department of Fish and Wildlife’s Midwater Trawl Survey, despite the stocking of thousands of hatchery-raised Delta Smelt in the Delta by a consortium of state and federal agencies for the past three years.

In the summer of 2024 a weekly survey by the US Fish and Wildlife Service targeting Delta smelt caught only one smelt. “A late April IEP juvenile fish survey (the 20-mm Survey) caught several juvenile Delta smelt in the same area,” noted fishery scientist Tom Cannon in his blog on the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance website: calsport.org/..

Meanwhile, the other pelagic species collected in the survey — striped bass, longfin smelt, Sacramento splittail and threadfin shad — continue their dramatic decline since 1967 when the State Water Project went into effect. Only the American shad shows a less precipitous decline.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/1/9/2295698/-Trump-Lies-Again-About-California-Wildfires-and-Delta-Smelt?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web

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