LOS ANGELES — The deadly wildfires in California have taken a lot of Donald Trump’s attention in his first week as president, and although he traveled to Los Angeles to see the damage, his tone in addressing the crisis has been more of blame than of seeking immediate solutions.
He has attacked Democratic politicians, and criticized supposed poor forest management and failed water policies. But there’s one much lesser-known party that he has also targeted: a tiny fish called the delta smelt.
“He wanted to protect an essentially worthless fish called a smelt,” Trump wrote on Truth Social about California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) on Jan. 8, a day after the fires started. “Now the ultimate price is being paid. I will demand that this incompetent governor allow beautiful, clean, fresh water to FLOW INTO CALIFORNIA!”
The delta smelt is a tiny silver fish one might mistake for a sardine that lives in waterways in California’s Central Valley, about a five-hour drive north of Los Angeles. It’s endangered ― and so rare that scientists often can’t even catch one when they cast nets in an attempt to count its remaining numbers in the wild. Conservationists say its value is in how it indicates the health of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, an immensely important waterway that provides irrigation to one of the country’s leading producers of almonds, grapes and milk.
In order to grow back the smelt’s numbers, the state has limited the amount of water from the delta that’s diverted for human usage and instead has allowed more water to flow from the basin to the sea. This has made the smelt the bane of California farmers’ existence, as they now have access to less water in the region.
And Trump has seized onto the fish as a symbol of California’s dysfunction, using it to spread inaccuracies about the state’s water.
“What we’re hearing from the president is this complicated mix of him trying to deliver quickly on his campaign promises and all the things that seem to resonate well with some of his stakeholders in the Central Valley and these kind of wild half truths, or maybe misunderstandings of how California water works in the first place,” said Karrigan Bork, the interim director of the University of California Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences.
“We’ve heard everything from California could be getting water from Canada — which just isn’t true — to efforts trying to tie the delta smelt in California’s use of water for ecosystem protection for the fires in LA — which just isn’t true,” Bork said. “So it’s been frankly exhausting trying to keep up with correcting all the misinformation.”
While reports found that some fire hydrants failed to produce water during Los Angeles’ Pacific Palisades fire, Trump’s claims that they could have been fixed by redirected water from 300 miles north are factually incorrect, experts say, and also unnecessary. Reservoirs around Los Angeles are at average levels, and the hydrants failed largely due to issues with the local infrastructure.
“There’s not a faucet that’s turned off and on,” Bork said. “The problem that LA had with fire hydrants going dry and not having enough water to fight the fire is the same problem you have when you’ve got three people trying to take a shower at your house at the same time, and nobody has water pressure.”
Yet, one of the 26 executive orders Trump signed on his first day in office specifically addressed the delta smelt. The directive, “Putting People Over Fish,” ordered his administration to look into ways to better allow California residents and businesses to pull from the water in the state’s San Joaquin River Basin.
“Los Angeles has massive amounts of water available to it. All they have to do is turn the valve,” Trump told reporters at his first press briefing last Tuesday. “It’s to protect the delta smelt. It’s a fish that’s doing poorly anyway.”
The delta smelt was first thrust into the national stage in 2009, thanks to Fox News. While the fight over the fish had been tumultuous locally, it wasn’t until it was listed as an endangered species in 2009 under Barack Obama that it got broader attention as a culture war issue. That year Sean Hannity introduced it on a segment of his prime-time show.
During the episode, Hannity proclaimed: “Turn the water back on.”
“Farmers in California, they’re losing their land, crops and their livelihood, all because of a 2-inch fish,” he said, before tossing the show to a package featuring then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).
Nunes’ family had owned a dairy farm in California’s San Joaquin Valley while he was growing up, and his constituents saw the give and take of seasonal water resources as the difference between making a livelihood.
It was the congressman who introduced Trump to the irritating smelt during his first presidential campaign. As Trump tells it, he first visited the verdant valley with Nunes to hold a rally in 2016.
“You’d see an acre, about an acre or two acres, with the most beautiful green plants growing in it, the most beautiful, it’s rich stuff. And you look at the soil, and it’s so rich. That soil is almost the equivalent to, like, Iowa soil. It’s phenomenal,” Trump recalled of his trip at the press conference last Tuesday.
Nunes had been an early and ardent supporter of Trump, and the two grew close as they attended fundraisers together across the state, traveling together in Trump’s campaign plane.
Speaking at his rally in Tulare on May 27, 2016, Trump repeated Nunes and Hannity’s talking points.
“They have farms up here, and they don’t get water. I said, ‘Oh, that’s too bad, do you have a drought?’ And they said, ‘No, we shove it out to sea.’” I said, ‘Why?’ And nobody even knows why. The environmentalists don’t even know why,” Trump told the booing crowd. “They are trying to protect a 3-inch fish.”
Nunes told reporters at the time that he was pleased with Trump’s stumping.
“I thought he did a great job,” he told The Fresno Bee before referring to Trump as “our best chance to improve the water situation here in the Valley.”
Trump went on to win over most of the counties in the region in 2016, and Nunes was appointed to be a member of Trump’s first transition team.
Weeks before Nunes’ tight House midterm race in 2018, Trump set a deadline for the Interior and Commerce departments to review federal water policies in California. For two months, Trump had been stoking the narrative that the state’s water laws were hindering efforts to fight Northern California’s deadly Carr fire. Nunes won his reelection. And in 2020, Trump returned to the valley where in front of a 2,000-person rally, he signed a memorandum that directed federal officials to capture and store more water from the delta to “provide greater regulatory certainty to agricultural and municipal water users.”
California later sued the administration, and the policy was changed under Joe Biden. That new federal policy was just approved late last year. Trump’s new executive order vows to restart the fight over water policies.
Water policy experts view Trump’s renewed focus on the state’s water as more pandering than policy.
“I think one audience is the Central Valley farmers who did vote for Trump overwhelmingly and have elected a number of conservative Republicans to the House,” Bork said. “I think the other piece of this is playing to his base nationally. I think it’s easy to paint this as wacko leftist California environmentalists who are keeping these hard-working farmers from getting the water they need to go to crops, and who are keeping LA from getting the water that it needs to fight fires.”
“He’s seen an opportunity to weigh in on an issue where cities, by and large, have one strong opinion, and rural regions have a different one,” said Brent Haddad, a professor of environmental studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. “In California, the cities are mostly Democratic voters. In the rural regions are mostly Republican voters. And so it’s just an opportunity to throw red meat to Republican voters in California, but it doesn’t advance policy or help the economy or rural people one bit.”
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As for the struggling smelt, conservationists say it’s more likely to go extinct than be pulled from the endangered species list. But Haddad said either outcome wouldn’t matter to Trump.
“It’s the most uncharismatic fish you’ll ever meet, OK?” he said. “It’s an endangered species that became a rallying cry. But even if the delta smelt didn’t exist, you’d still have the same issues of interests up and down the state vying for part of the water system.”