Tell all your leftist friends to drop a dollar in the “Trump was right” jar.
As many search for answers as to how the California wildfires became a disaster that officials find little hope in containing, President-elect Donald Trump told podcaster Joe Rogan in October that a crisis loomed from California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handling of the water supply.
Political commentator Collin Rugg posted the relevant clip from the episode to the social media platform X.
Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on the California water/fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan.
Turns out, he was right.
Trump spent nearly 7 minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem.
Trump specifically… pic.twitter.com/zSls82byPo
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 8, 2025
“In Los Angeles, you can’t get proper amounts of water,” Trump said.
He then told Rogan a story about driving through California farmlands with members of Congress, seeing how bad the land was, and asking, “‘How come all this land is so barren?’ It’s farmland, and it looked terrible,” he recalled.
He further stated that when he asked what the issue was, the congressmen informed him the water was not allowed to flow into the area from further north, despite northern California and further towards Canada having what Trump described as “more water than they could ever use.”
He gave Rogan the explanation for this: “to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean.”
Is California leadership at least partially responsible for the fire crisis?
Here Trump is referring to the delta smelt, a fish that Newsom sued the Trump administration to protect under the Endangered Species Act when he wanted to block federal water rules in 2020.
Had those rules gone into effect in California, over 600,000 acre-feet of water in an average year would have flowed into southern California from the north.
In assessing what could have been and the situation now, Trump continued, “I could have water for all of that land. Water for your forests. You know, your forests are dry as a bone.”
“[Dry forests are] not only dangerous. Billions of dollars a year they spend on forest fires.”
After blasting California’s counterproductive forest regulations that would have lessened the likelihood of the current disaster, Trump took aim at Newsom.
In referencing his 2020 spat with the California governor, he claimed he told Newsom, “You’ve got so much water. All you have to do is sign, and that guy didn’t want to sign.”
Another user responded showing how legacy media outlets defended Newsom, going after any measures Trump wanted to see implemented.
He was been warning them since 2017. They continued to ignore him and “fact check” him. pic.twitter.com/rf2wEAYCi7
— Burt Macklin (@BurtMaclin_FBI) January 8, 2025
In January 2025, it seems that Newsom’s administration should have listened.
Ironically, during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Newsom accused Trump of politicizing this issue via posts on Truth Social.
It looks like Newsom was the one politicizing California’s water supply as he decided in 2020 he’d rather score anti-Trump points by opposing the then-president, rather than listen to him and take practical measures to get water further south.
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