ONE VIDEO: Donald Trump & the Very Large Faucet on the U.S.-Canadian Border
A reminder of just how unable Donald Trump is to have a chain of thought, or to connect to reality these days...
A reminder of just how unable Donald Trump is to have a chain of thought, or to connect to reality these days...
Donald Trump has a very unconventional take on Pacific Coast-region water resources here in America. & one where none of his “allies” have lifted a finger to disabuse him. He has creatures seeking to make a buck or two off of him, but no friends:
What I most want to know is: Who told Donald Trump that there are water-transport irrigation canals from near Calgary and Vancouver down to southern California, and how, precisely, they breach the walls that are the Sierra Nevada and the Cascade ranges? Why did he believe them? Why has nobody found it worth their time to enlighten him about how things really work?
Donald Trump: ‘You have millions of gallons of water pouring down from the north with the snow caps in Canada and all pouring down. And they have a essentially a very large fauce. And you turn the faucet—and it takes one day to turn it: it's massive, it's as big as the wall of that building right there behind you. And you turn that and all of that water goes into the aimlessly into the Pacific. And if they turned it back all of that water would come right down here and right into Los Angeles. They wouldn't have to have people not use more than 30 gallons.
They want to do that you know. They're trying to do that. And you have so much water.And all those fields that are right now barren—the farmers would have all the water they needed. And you could revert water up into the hills, where you have all the dead forests, where the forest is so brittle because in places like California. I go to Austria. The head of Austria tells me—you know—“we have trees that are much more flammable than what you have in California. We never have forest fires”. Because they maintain their forests.
And you have all that water that could be used to as water, what they call
waterflow, where the water— you know—where the land would be damp, and you'd stop many of these horrible fires that are costing billions and billions of dollars by the federal government, etc.
So one thing I'm going to do for California—vote for me California. I'm going to give you safety. I'm going to give you a great border. And I'm going to give you more water than almost anybody has. And the farmers up north are going to be able to use 100% of their land, not 1% of their land. And the water is going to come all the way down to Los Angeles. And you're going to have more water than you ever saw. And the smelt is not making it anyway. In fact, they make and grow smelt because it dies all the way up and down the line. And they put stuff that was artificially made—you know.
So you're going to have water in California at a level that you've never seen before. The farmers are going to do great. Those fields are going to be all green instead of 1% green.
And, maybe even more important, you're not going to have illegal immigrants pouring into your country and killing your family. You're not going to have the problems that you have right now.
We're going to lower your taxes. We're going to bring the car industry back—cuz your car industry is gone. We're bringing it back to Detroit at levels that you'll never see again We’ll bring it back to better than it was 30 years ago.
But with this group, everything is dead. The automobile industry is dead. The water coming here is dead. And Gavin Newsom is going to sign those papers. And if he doesn't sign those papers, we won't give him money to put out all his fires. And if we don't give him the money to put out his fires he's got problems. He's a lousy governor. And he treated me very nicely. And I treated him very nicely when I was president.But he's done a lousy job…
I mean. What can you say? This is the reason that nobody has any idea Trump administration policy will turn out to be. The Scott Bessent affinity has stepped up on the volume of its “he thinks he is graded on the stock market, do everything he does that makes the stock market go down will be very quickly reversed”. And we can hope that that is so, since the alternative is so much worse.
But I would be surprised if Scott Bessent had any confidence that his people are epressing a truth than a mere hope.
If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…
Faucets
I know that getting California water from the Central Valley to the Los Angeles basin is just not a matter of turning on a faucet. I came by this knowledge in a visceral way.
In my misspent youth, I financed my education by working in heavy construction. I was once working on building Interstate 5 in in the Tejon Pass region, which is the summit of the route between the Central Valley and LA.
This route is also used by the California Water Project, which transports water from the north of the Central Valley down to LA. Nearby our freeway project, water is stored in two reservoirs, connected by a tunnel.
The tunnel was constructed with reinforced concrete and was egg shaped which was supposed to be the best way to distribute the stress. Unfortunately, it didn't work and the walls were crumbling in. To solve this the tunnel was being reinforced by steel I beams. The space between the I beams and the tunnel sides had to be filled by concrete. My construction company was doing the filing as a side job. My part in this was to work inside the tunnel for two weeks, mixing sand, rock, cement, and water, using a shovel, hoe, and wheelbarrow. The work was physically hard and boring. The experience brought home to me the fact that building a water transportation system from the north of California to the South was not just a matter of turning on a faucet.
Trump started out with $500 million; I started out with the work ethic and zero dollars. I did get a boost from the fact that my uncle was the project manager of the freeway job. In return for hard physical work and some danger, I was making a lot of money.
But Trump had the experience that things are as easy as turning on faucets. The people who voted for him somehow feel that their grocery prices would go down if Trump just turns on the right faucets
Allen Kamp
.
A bunch of California Central Valley voters also seem to believe something like this. It is a very popular conspiracy theory among rural Republicans that there’s actually still plenty of water, all the water restraints are a conspiracy theory, and Democrats are dumping water into the Pacific, to save the Delta Smelt or whatever.